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If I have 2 automations with the same trigger, is there a danger of one automation triggering first, which would prevent the second from triggering?

Here’s my situation. When I enter a deposit amount into a client’s record (“deposit” is “not empty”), an automation does two things:

  1. update client status to “Unscheduled”
  2. send email to client

I want to pull out all of my “send email” actions from other automations, so they are easier to turn off while working on the database. So, if I break that automation into 2 separate automations that both trigger on “deposit” is “not empty”, is there a danger of only one triggering?

Personally, if you’re going to do this, I would add another column for “scheduling email sent” or similar. That being a checkbox which is set by the second automation. This way you know for sure the second automation ran.

Definitely. There’s no guarantee what the trigger order would be.

I think this is a great plan. Have a single automation that handles all emails, and then have all other automations use that one. How to do that? Webhooks.

You can now use a webhook trigger for automations. Here’s the basic process that I’m picturing:

  • Set up an automation that triggers from a webhook. The only action in that automation is the flavor of “Send email” that you prefer (Airtable vs Google). The email action would use data passed to the webhook trigger: recipient email address, email body text, etc.
  • Set up all of your other automations that need to send emails to make a call to that webhook with the proper data formatted as JSON. Making such a call will require using a script action, which is only possible for bases in Pro-plan workspaces or higher. The script should be designed to exit cleanly if the webhook fails; e.g. if you disable the email automation while testing other operations in the base.

The number of automations that run is going to increase, so you’ll need to see how that fits into your workspace’s automation allotment. However, with all emails centralized, it would make maintenance of the email system a lot easier.

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