Upcoming changes to our automated notifications - live today 17th April 2020

Susan Peck

@AverageUser and @Thibault P

you are not alone.

If you haven't already, please submit an Enhancement Request to provide feedback to the Product team about this new update. If enough of us ask, maybe they will give us the option of using either a generic address or personal address.

Thibault P

@Susan B Peck

Done 😉

Kimanh To

In our case, it makes no sense, since the alerts appear to be coming from random users in our account, and not even the sheet owner. How is this happening? It is causing massive confusion for us. I am submitting an enhancement request as well, but wanted to mention our specific issue and to see if anyone else is experiencing alerts coming from random users and not even owners?

Susan Peck

@Kimanh To If I'm understanding the implementation correctly, the sender will be either the sheet owner or the person who made the changes. If only one person has made changes, the notification appears to come from that person. If multiple people have made changes, the notification appears to come from the sheet owner.

That said, I've seen at least one instance where it didn't work that way (I think only one person had made changes, but the notification was from the sheet owner).

Is that the behavior you are seeing or something else?

Manu

All email automations have me as the sender (I am the sheet owner), which is causing a lot of issues. I was hoping that the sender would be whoever creates the automation because this way it's easy to change the sender. This seems like a more logical behaviour, and with cloning it is easy to change sender at any time.

beakin

Well this thread solves the mystery for us as to why my name has been showing up in the notifications on all our workflows.

I sent an email to productinfo@smartsheet.com as was suggested above but thought I would add my 2c here, too.

Ideally, all notifications would be from the person who triggered the notification rather than the sheet owner.

Someone else above mentioned this too, but I've created sheets for others before and if they're using notifications on those sheets I'm sure the folks receiving those notifications would be confused to see my name on the notification.

Thanks to everyone at Smartsheet for your continued support.

EsKay

@Susan B Peck @Thibault P - What category did you use to submit the Product Enhancement? I want to make sure, I do the same. Very frustrating as I am building a sheet to be used across the company and I don't want all responses to come to me. As I was testing it, I noticed the From email had changed to mine.

Susan Peck

@EsKay I honestly don't remember! I just looked at the form and I also don't remember there being so many, many choices. This one could easily fall under Alerts, Notifications, Workflows, Automation, Usability, and more! I hope Smartsheet isn't dicing their feedback too small.

Thibault P

@EsKay

If I remember well, I did as following :

The problem is not solved, I can't understand why an update still is not coming...

Kate_

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/247211#Comment_247211

Thanks @Paul Newcome (delayed response as I hadn't seen your post). I've got a meeting with our Account Manager to discuss after I mentioned it in some feedback recently. I've also submitted an enhancement request too :-)

Jason Murphy

Hi Smartsheet, everyone,

Has there been any development with this? I've built a workflow that is used by hundreds of users, and the volume of direct emails to me is becoming unmanageable. I have nothing to do with the business process that the workflow is designed for, but it's a natural response that stakeholders will reach out to me as my name is on the automation emails. Some of them are also likely replying to the automation emails expecting that they will receive a response and not realising it will never reach me. This is also really bad for my professional reputation. I have submitted a request to have this amended and would appreciate some way of reverting back to the generic sent from address - or at least some way of modifying the sent by address for automation emails. This is frustrating and urgent at this point. Please listen to your users. I am not the only person that has raised this concern.

Regards,

Jason.

Susan Peck

@Jason Murphy - Jason, I was just about to ask the same question!

Just last week, we discovered a person in our accounting department was not sending out invoices to customers because the reminders were coming from me and she knew I have NOTHING to do with the task so she ignored them. Putting the sheet owner's name on these emails is confusing and counter-productive.

Smartsheet, please give us an update? Please give us the flexibility to set this value as a generic account (how it used to be) or the sheet owner.

It would be interesting to hear from some people who actually think the change is good and accomplished what the development team expected. My suspicion is that people were ignoring reminders for reasons other than who was in the From field.

David Sterling

As a short term work around I created a dummy profile and gave it a generic name, but something else to consider is that you cannot re-use an email domain for a existing SS account. Luckily for me my company had just created an alias domain so I was able to use that. Hope that helps someone!

Amanda Merrigan

Still no update on this? I still have staff replying to me but I have NOTHING to do with the task other than I am SS admin. It's been an ongoing issue for a lot of people for almost 3 months now and no solution has been created? That's quite disappointing.

Susan Peck

TOTALLY AGREE!

I've had one department Ignore requests to do things because the emails came from me and I have nothing to do with their work. So, the goal of changing this feature backfired a bit.

Please, please give us the option to customize the Sender name!