Comments - Email notifications/hyperlinks

lpierre

Hi All,

Just throwing this out there, but is anyone else experiencing this?

Multiple people in my organization have reported that the email notifications they are sending out via Smartsheet comments are not being received. Not when they CC themselves and not to their recipients; they would even get the "Email Sent" message.

Screenshot 2022-10-14 152748.png

And on the other hand, there have been reports when the emails were received but the hyperlinks included have been removed. In the place of the hyperlink it would say "External link removed".

Screenshot 2022-10-14 161230.png

Granted, it's not happening to everyone. I tried it myself and everything is working fine on my end.

I'm asking to see if this is an internal issue or other organizations are facing the same issue.

Thanks!

Nicole D

Hello - Have you considered editing automation permissions to see if it helps?

lpierre

Hi Nicole,

No, we haven't considered editing automations since we're not depending on that. I believe that automations we are actively using are working fine. The issue at hand are emailing the comments. Even now, I am still receiving reports that the emails are not coming through.

Gbur

This recently begun happening on 10/6/22 for us on email notifications from Smartsheet for a "Request for Smartsheet license" email. The last 3 I have received have truncated the domain alias with the text [External link removed].

Gbur

FYI, I escalated it to our IT team, suspecting the spam filter could be at play. They took a look, said, it was not on our side, it was on the Smartsheet side. I've submitted a support ticket. Pending more information.

lpierre

We also spoke with our IT department and they said the same. Meeting with Smartsheet support team soon. Will update on this.

Gbur

Case number is 05781032

No traction on the ticket though. No reply yet.

lpierre

Finally had a call with SS Support. They identified there's an issue and are currently working on it.

Hopefully, this gets resolved soon.

Gbur

Smartsheet Support just confirmed this is on them. While their reply is not helpful, it is useful to know that they acknowledge that it is on their side of the fence.

From Tier 2 Technical Support Specialist:

• "Upon bringing this support issue to my management, and having other senior techs review this, my team has been made aware that what you are experiencing is expected behavior following a change that was implemented here in the last couple of months. It is not documented in Help Center articles.
• The change was made to block suspicious links so they have stripped external URLs from emails sent out of Smartsheet not only by Trial users, but by Unlicensed users, to mitigate some email abuse by bad actors.
• That functionality is not configurable by customers within the application."

lpierre

Smartsheet Support confirmed the following for both issues:

Email notifications - Free Unlicensed Users are limited when emailing SS comments. Limit is 20 unique email addresses for every 24 hrs (this includes @ mentioned email addresses as well. This limit is subject to change at any time. Advised to grant Free Users licenses to avoid the limit.

Removed Hyperlinks - This is expected behavior for Free Unlicensed Users. Advised that we either grant our Unlicensed Free Users licenses or submit an enhancement/feature request to SS Product Team or create an idea post in the Smartsheet Product Feedback and Ideas topic. I find this disappointing. Links provided in emails and successfully being received should be a basic function.

Can't say I am pleased with the outcome of this.

LeslieW

I agree that this is an issue. Smartsheet has gone through various changes differentiating the access of free users outside an organization vs. unlicensed users within an organization vs. licensed users. They've made multiple changes over the years, and seem to be closing the gap on the distinction of access/abilities between free EXTERNAL users and (free) unlicensed users within an organization.

I subscribe to all update notifications from Smartsheet and have never received any notification regarding these types of changes - the changes are just implemented and our team members are left wondering why they are unable to do things they previously could do (such as email a comment from Smartsheet).

Not all team members need licenses, and we do not want all team members to be able to create new sheets, and up until a month or two ago, they were able to use the email comments function without any issue - now they are limited in how many recipients they may email comments to in a 24-hour period and are not able to include links in their messages. (A couple years ago, a similar restriction was placed on free EXTERNAL users, which I was told was to increase security, which made sense for EXTERNAL users, however, this explanation doesn't hold up as well when the same type of restriction is being placed on free unlicensed users registered to the company's account).

This seems like just another way that Smartsheet is trying to make money by forcing companies to make all their internal users Licensed users (under the guise of trying to increase security). This is disabling our teams' abilities to utilize Smartsheet, and changes such as these (and the run-around you get from SS "support") are mounting reasons for us to consider dropping Smartsheet and switching to another project management program. 😔