Removing all of the irrelevant footer information added by Smartsheet to Automation emails

Peter Briscall

We are using automation to external workers to update smartsheet. We have a number of issues that have been aired before.

1. The smartsheet owners name appearing in the email address. Confuses the worker when the sheet owner does not interact with worker. Only option is to use a licence and set it up as a general name so that its just a company email address but why should I have to pay for a licence just to remove the name.
2. Automated messages have redundant information in the footer which is totally irrelevant to our business.

Why would it need the email name, the email recipient knows its their email.

Do you want to receive these emails? Unsubscribe? The worker has agreed to work with with/for us so if they want to stop receiving emails they will tell us. just one worker accidentally clicking unsubscribe generates lots of work. We have the processes to stop send work to them already.

Why would I send work to someone who does not want work from us???

And the rest just opens up lots of questions and stops them agreeing to work as they feel they are being tied into something or even liable for charges.

I still say Smartsheet adding information that is not from my company is breaching GDPR.

Any help appreciated as its looking like we will have to simply replace what we are doing to reduce the constant effort of explaining to workers what this means.

This notification was sent to xxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.xx

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Sean Morgan

Hello @Peter Briscall ,

Thanks for the great feedback regarding the branded information from Automated Workflows!

We hope to see further developments with our Email feature, but in the meantime, please can you raise an Enhancement Request using the Hamburger / 3 horizontal line menu in the top left of this page.

Please note that you can make multiple request for other changes you'd like to see.

Let me know if you have any questions

Regards

Sean

Peter Briscall

I have raised this before as it has been causing varying issues with workers and giving out direct links to our smartsheets. Great for Smartsheet advertising but really interferes with our GDPR as Smartsheet have no agreement with our workers to send information.

This is all leading to moving to a different platform that will not add reams of irrelevant information, and when I enquired on how to stop it using Smartsheet the answer was $2,000 per annum for an upgrade.

The only addition that is passable to my automated messages is the Smartsheet name at the bottom. No links or anything else.

The only onward route should be the button containg the link to update the information in the rows/cells reqested

Peter

Tony Exline

I've just gone through a 6 month exercise of building out a solution with Smartsheet that relies heavily on notifications to our non-licensed staff. Now I find that anyone receiving one of our notifications can unsubscribe and remove themselves from any further notifications, and there is no way to disable this.

This effectively renders our solution all but useless.

If the "Unsubscribe" and other Smartsheet boilerplate cannot currently be removed, is there a way to at least "reset" unsubscribed emails?

colemant

Yeah I just found out I have to e-mail all my users outside of the system now, as sending a group sharing, or even many individuals sharing access - means I have to share with them who else is receiving mails.... these are competitors..... so really frustrating -there has to be some way so suppress the "This Notification was sent to" when sharing an item...

That's a pretty horrible loophole left in there, I wonder how many people don't even spot that in testing an end to end solution. I hope I'm just missing a basic setting somewhere...

colemant

@Sean @Genevieve P

at the bottom of the mail invite the collaborator gets, they get to see who I've shared the item with - the entire group CC'd in. I have about 670 users in a group, as mentioned most of these are competitors. Is the only way to not message them from Smartsheet?

Genevieve P.

Hi @colemant

Can you clarify your process a bit more?

If you have a workflow set up to email specific users as the action of the workflow, they will receive an email with a generic footer (even if other emails are included in that workflow):

However if you're talking about providing users with Sharing permissions on an item and the automated email that lets them know about that sheet, then there currently isn't a way to hide the other emails shared to the same item.

Keep in mind that a Shared collaborator at any point can click on the "Share" button on an item and see who else has access to the same item (see: Share Sheets, Reports, and Dashboards).

If you're looking to provide external collaborators with access to view a sheet without seeing who else is able to access the item, you may want to look into Publishing the sheet instead (see: Publish a Sheet, Report, or Dashboard). From this view, collaborators would all have a generic "Published User" title.

Cheers,

Genevieve

colemant

Thanks for clarifying Genevieve very helpful as always. I'm looking at the second scenario -sharing to a defined group of users. Publishing might be the option, as I recall I could publish only to people who are registered, so they would have to log in first anyway?

So far I've locked down the sharing to groups - so no individual/named user should be visible to the collaborators.

Regards

Genevieve P.

Hi @colemant

Oh yes, I see! Good point:

"Anyone on the same Smartsheet plan as the group can click the group name and select View Group Members to reveal the email addresses and names of its members. Anyone not on the Smartsheet plan will only be able to see the group name." (Manage and Use Smartsheet Contact Groups)

In this case, I would simply share the sheet without sending the notification. You can then notify each group separately or send out an email with the other members BCC'd so it's more private.

In regards to publishing, you can force a login before accessing the sheet, but that's only if all these collaborators are part of your company's account/plan: