Alerts only partially working

Tracy Petrie

This is a slight variation on the "Alerts not working" or "Alerts stopped working" questions that pop up frequently. In my case, the alerts stopped working and I finally figured out that if I created an alert *that did not include links* they would appear on my home page and in my emails. Including fields in the message text was fine too. But if I included any links, no alerts and no emails would be generated.

Is this a bug or a "feature" or yet another arcane box that must be checked somewhere?

Note: Smartsheets is integrated into our organization and hence I log in using SSO. Not sure if that matters but it may have an impact.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Tracy Petrie

Hyperlinks or links in emails (especially automated ones) are a red flag for a lot of Spam filters. Is it possible that either your own Spam is catching this, or your company has an email filter set up (for example a service that captures mail from new senders, like Mimecast)? See: Issue: Email Not Received from Smartsheet

I will note that if this is the case you should still be receiving the alert from within the Smartsheet App, in the notification center. If you don't see anything there, I would check to make sure your personal notification settings allow for alerts triggered by your own changes to be sent to yourself.

Cheers,

Genevieve

Tracy Petrie

Hi Genevieve,

I initially contacted our IT dept. to work out why our spam filters were rejecting Smartsheet emails (under the very same assumption you made). Then I realized I was not getting alerts in the Smartsheet notification center either. I created three automation actions all triggered by adding new rows. One generated a message with links, one generated a message with no links but with embedded values, and one generated a static message with no links. The two with no links got through (including the one with embedded values); the one with links did not. I also get alerts in my notification center for the two successfully executed automation actions.

Also, all settings are checked for receiving notifications.

Thanks for looking into this for me. Others at OHSU are having the same issue so I'll be able to pass along any resolutions to those folks and to our IT team so they're ready with an answer in the future.

--Tracy

Genevieve P.

Hi @Tracy Petrie

That's definitely unexpected behaviour, then! We'll need more information in order to troubleshoot this, so contact Smartsheet Support so they can work with you in a private channel.

It will be helpful for them to have the Sheet URL where the workflows are set up and the three workflow IDs for your three tests (indicating which is which). Please also tell them the time/date where you triggered the workflows so they can check the back end to see if it was triggered or not... screen captures of each workflow set up would also be valuable.

Thank you!

Genevieve

Tracy Petrie

Hmmm. Well after what seems like a few months of this not working, it suddenly, magically started working. I tweaked the names of the workflows to make my Support ticket clearer and tested it and voila! it seems to be working. I'll wait and test again in a couple of days in case this is a random/sporadic bug.

Genevieve P.

Ok, good to know! Please do follow-up if this happens again.