Email Automation and avoiding multiple email CCs

Hey ​@Yka,

You have a couple of different alternatives. Probably the one I’d suggest:

Assign team members through a separate Assignments table, where each assignment is a unique record with a 1:1 relationship between the “task” or whatever the main record is and the Team Member. Under this scenario, each Assignment record would trigger its unique email, without including any other assigned member. At a tasks table you can have a lookup from the Assignments table to show all team members assigned to such task. More on lookup fields here.

Alternatively, if you are assigning multiple team members at the same time (e.g. through a form) you can send one unique email to both at the same time.

Hope this helps, and feel free to reach out if you have any further question on how to set this up!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

I dont want to alter the design, keeping it simple is best.

I’m not sure how it works under the hood, but if I was able to turn off the ‘cc’ field, it seems to be picking up the exact email that is being added to the record, so a 2nd person would get direct email without doing the CC to the others?

Hey ​@Yka!

As far as I can see, no value is being passed to the CC field of the automation. So I don’t think that is the issue. 
 

Given that the trigger is set to when the record gets updated, I believe that what is happening is that each time you assign a new user the automation gets triggered. 
 

First time you assign a user, only one email address is found. - sends one email to one person.

Second time you assign a user, now the record has 2 email addresses. -sends one additional email, to two persons this time. 

Your Assigned field has multiple users, so when you assign more than one person, Airtable sends the email to all of them together. It’s not using CC. It puts all users in the To field because the field itself contains multiple people.

If you want each person to get their own email, you should set up a junction table.This means creating a new table called Assignments. In that table, each row connects one task to one user.

Then you set up your automation to trigger from the Assignments table instead of the main task table. That way, every time a task is assigned to someone, it creates a new row in Assignments, and the email gets sent to just that one person.

Taha, Airtable Advisor

that makes sense. simplest solution I came up with is adding a ‘notify’ field with checkbox, that will be used when all the emails are entered. 

Exactly ​@Yka that is also a great solution as it will trigger the automation only once!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation