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I have several automations set up to send emails through gmail based on certain conditions (dates coming up, status changes, etc.). They have been working like a charm until yesterday! 

2 different gmail accounts should have automatically sent 200 or so emails each. 1 gmail address seems to have worked fine. The other sent maybe 5 or 6 of the emails but not the rest. However, the automation log shows all 200 were successful. I know they didn’t actually send because I have the emails BCC myself, to ensure they show up in my gmail account. 

Now when I am testing the automations, no emails are sending, even from the address that worked yesterday. I tried relinking the google accounts to airtable. No dice! Any ideas??

Hi ​@sam-lsf-lst,


Sounds like a sending limit issue on Gmail. Gmail and Office 365 actually have daily limits on the number of emails you can send via third party smtp integrations like Airtable and Zapier etc. my guess is your first few tests maxed out your limit which is why it sent 6 and then stopped. The daily limit for Gmail is 150-200 ish I think and for the paid workspace its higher.

 

If you’re going to be bulk sending emails then services like Gmail and Office are not ideal as they have rate and volume limits. Better to use a full blown mailer solution like Mailchimp, Sendgrid or Mailer Lite etc.

 

Hope that helps! 
 

J.


Yes, building onto what ​@j-hugg-ins said above:

You will likely need to use a 3rd-party mailing service to send your emails.

  1. If you want to MANUALLY send your emails from Airtable (i.e. no automations at all), you can use either the SendGrid extension or the MailerSend extension.

    (However, I would not recommend using SendGrid, because it is a difficult platform to work with, and its extension doesn’t support attachments. I much prefer MailerSend.)
  1. If you want to AUTOMATE the sending your emails from Airtable, I would recommend using one of my 2 favorites: MailerSend or MailGun.

    Then, you would handle the automation by using Airtable in conjunction with Make’s automations & integrations. (I am not a fan of Zapier, because it is underpowered and overpriced compared to Make.)

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


Ok there seems to be a different issue at play. 
These are regular reminder emails - 2 different gmail accounts should automatically send 200 or so emails each. 1 gmail address (funding) seems to work fine. The other (sam) sends maybe 5 or 6 of the emails but should send 180. 

Even when I test the sam emails only (so not flirting with the gmail send limit, which is quite high as we’re on a paid workspace), only those same 5 or 6 send. 

Here are the triggers for Sam’s emails: 

 

 

I can’t seem to find anything wrong with these filters - when I set up a view based on these exact filters, I get all 180 in the filter. 

 

The automation history shows success for the 5 or 6 

 

But the rest seem to be successful for the trigger only

 

But all 180 have that additional filter of If Language is EN

 

When I test the automation using a random selection from the 180, it works. 

 

So why isn’t it being triggered by the date filter???


Also when I’m testing things, it seems I can only get the “Date is # of days from now” trigger to fire at midnight of that date. So I have to wait a whole day between tests. 

Is there another option?


Hey ​@sam-lsf-lst ,

Not sure what’s going on here to be honest but one thing I will say is that sometiomes setting up conditrions as a formula firld in the table is easier to manage and control than adding loads of conditions in the automation. For example if you want to have your records in that table triggering on something like 22 days from now and after 11am UTC (all Airtable’s time calcs run in UTC) you could create a simple formula field called Send with the following formula:
 

IF(
  AND(
    {Final Report Received?} = 0,
    DATETIME_DIFF({Date}, TODAY(), 'days') = 22,
    HOUR(NOW()) >= 11,
    WEEKDAY(TODAY()) < 5
  ),
  TRUE()
)


What this does is check to see if the {Final Report Received?} is unchecked which I’m assuming is then checked after the email is sent but if not you can ignore that. It is good to have a checkbox that gets ticked when automated emails get sent though just to guard against accidental re-sends. The rest of the checks are to check if the {Date} field you are triggering on is 22 days from now, and the time now in UTC is 11am or later, and its a weekday (you can remove that if you don’t care about weekend deliveries)… if all of these are true this field will render as true, if not then it will be blank. This means you can replace your ‘X days from today’ condition in the automation with when ‘Send’ is not empty.

I know this isn’t a fix persay but it’s a much better way in my expereince to handle timining emails as you have more precise control and you don’t have to wait for midnight for it to trigger! :)

As for the main issue its strange as the logs should show that the Language = EN check is false if that was why it wasn’t proceeding to the send email step. At first I thought maybe there’s a duplicate value in your Language single select filed like you have EN and then EN_ with a trailing white space which could look identical but fail to match in a check. But then you said you’ve randomly tested different batches and they work so likely not that. Good luck with the testing mate and sorry I can’t be more useful!

J.


The conditionals in your screenshots don’t seem to match, in one of them it’s ‘Language’, and in the other it’s ‘Language (from Youth Forum ID)’.  Not sure if that’s related?

If you could DM me a link to your base I’d be happy to see what I could figure out; there seems to be a lot of variables at play here and it’s difficult to troubleshoot from the screenshots


Hey ​@sam-lsf-lst would you like to hop on a very brief call to go through it and see what is going on?

Mike


Thank you all! Last night’s batch seem to have worked so let’s hope just re-doing all the conditions from scratched worked this time??