Hey ​@M_L,

I def use scheduled emails (e.g. on a given day of the week at a given time the automation will trigger, will find records for which an email should be sent, loop through them (repeating group) and will send over the email).

In my experience this works great, and I don’t think there is much delay for the emails -could depend on how many records need to be fetched. Having said that, my emails are not time sensitive, but I don’t think yours are either given your comment. E.g. if the email gets sent 1 minute late, that would still be fine.

Would you like me to guide you through the process of how to set this automation? or are you good?
If yes, would you mind providing some additional context for your use case?

If possible, I’d suggest avoiding make and other automation tools if not fully needed (for sure, many times they are absolutely needed).

Hope this helps!
Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hi ​@Mike_AutomaticN,

Thanks for your response, that’d be great if you’re able to outline how to set up this kind of scheduled email automation within Airtable. We have 70 appointments a month, each appointment with 4 people. We want to send them 3 emails scheduled as follows: 7 days prior, 1 day prior, 1 hour prior to the appointment. I use the Gmail integration to avoid the Airtable email limits.

Thanks for any insight you’re able to provide.

-ML

Hey ​@M_L , you can definitely use Airtable for schedule emails, but if you plan to send newsletters of more “beautiful/better designed” content you might want to explore external tools like MailerLite, MailChimp and so.

But if these are simple emails AT is great for it. 

Any questions happy to help :)

If you have any question or need additional help just let me know.

There are 2 ways you can accomplish this. Both of them will typically be accurate to within a few minutes.

We often use the “at a scheduled time” automation trigger to send emails on a schedule. If you are looking to send out all emails at the same time, or a couple of set times, this could work well.

Otherwise, if you are looking to send appointment reminders a certain amount of time before the appointment is scheduled, you can create a formula field that compares the time of “now” to the time you want the email to send, and returns a checkbox if they match. Then, create a view that shows all appointment records where there is a match, and use that view to trigger the automation.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like help setting this up!

I’d second Sam’s formula based conditions, the only issue you’ll have in setting up these as native Airtable integrations is getting the triggers to fire when you want, which you can approach in a lot of ways (creating views, etc) but as long as you don’t mind the extra fields the formula+checkbox is a great approach.

I don’t use scheduled emails per se, but I extensively use the Airtable email automation and it works pretty great all things considered. You can go ham implementing Make and get some fancier features, but I’ve had good luck with AT emails not getting caught in spam filters and such. 

Hey ​@M_L,

I recorded a brief YouTube video for you, going through what  Sam mentioned above. 
Please excuse my YouTube skills! Lol.
 

Feel free to grab a slot using this link if you need any help setting this up. I’d be happy to help,.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

re: Over the last couple of years, I remember hearing on these forums that Airtable doesn’t update very regularly… and that if I say send it at 5:00pm Airtable might send it at 4:45pm or 5:15pm, or even a day late. Is that still the case, or can I send scheduled emails that are sent at the correct time yet? 

That’s still the case I’m afraid.  You’d be using NOW() and comparing it against the appointment time to figure out when to send out the reminder, but NOW() isn’t that accurate.  From the docs as of 22 July 25:

This function updates when the formula is recalculated, when a base is loaded, or otherwise roughly every 15 minutes when a base is open. If the base is closed, it will update approximately every hour only when the base has time-dependent automation triggers or actions, or sync dependencies.

For what it's worth the 7 day and 1 day ones would be easy enough to set up, you could set up your automation trigger like so:

Oh that is great, thanks for sharing ​@TheTimeSavingCo.
In my experience, updates seem to occur more like around 5mins or so. But it is great to have the official version!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thanks for all the responses. This is great news for my use case --- I can have 7 day, 1 day, and even 3 hour reminders go out. As long as it’s within an hour of those times it works for me.

Side note, I found a good idea to set up a “heartbeat” automation that runs hourly that will keep the base synced at least hourly even if I don’t have it open. I think this’ll help prevent any outliers of it taking a little (or a lot) more than an hour to refresh.

I’m hopeful I will be able to move all of my scheduled emails from Make to Airtable and to significantly reduce the learning curve to managing my Airtable bases for others.

Thanks!

ML