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I’m using the Outlook Email action to send my emails, because (1) my org uses Outlook, and (2) normal Send Email automations get caught by the spam filter of various Outlook distribution emails that are the recipients of certain automations.

In the last month, there have been two different instances of the Microsoft API being down, causing my Outlook Email-based notifications to fail to send. But these emails are sending essential information, and I’d like to be able to do something else (send a Slack, or use the standard Send Email action) if the automation failed. Is there anything in either automations or the various APIs that would support this?

Unfortunately, that isn’t possible with Airtable’s automations, but that is possible with Make’s advanced automations & integrations.

I typically recommend that most people recreate their most important automations in Make, because it allows you to do literally thousands upon thousands of things that you can’t do with Airtable’s automations.

One of the things that you can do with Make is setup “error paths”, so when something fails, you can tell it to do something else.

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. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Ha I had this problem and ended up creating a weird checking system for it

Fields needed:

  1. Date field: ‘Email Sending Attempt Date’ 
  2. Select field: ‘Email Status’
  3. Formula field: ‘Minutes since email sent’ - A DATETIME_DIFF of NOW() and ‘Email Sending Attempt Date’

And the original email sending automation would:

  1. Update the ‘Email Sending Attempt Date’ field with the time the automation ran and the ‘Email Status’ field with ‘Sending...’
  2. Attempt to send the email
  3. Update the ‘Email Status’ field with ‘Sent’

I then had another automation that would trigger whenever a record met the following conditions:

  1. ‘Email Status’ = ‘Sending’
  2. ‘Minutes since email sent’ > 5

And that’d do Slack message alert

And so the idea is that if the email automation fails, it won’t get to the second ‘Update record’ action to update the ‘Email Status’ field, does that make sense?

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