I’m using Airtable to organize a writing group, and I’m trying to set up an automation that will send a weekly reminder about the meeting on the day before we meet, but only to the people who opt into the reminders (who are all listed in a “Reminders List” view of my “Members” table). However, when I activate the automation, it sends multiple emails to each person on the list.
How have folks set up weekly reminders to a designated group? I can’t seem to get the table’s “email” field to work as a correct input for “To” so I’ve used another airtable community post’s recommendation of the “find records” action to make a list of people needing the email...but now instead of four people each receiving the email once, each of us receives the email four times.
Here’s what I currently have set up, in case that’s helpful:
Trigger: at a scheduled time (Mondays at 10am) - WORKS
First Action: find records (From the “Members” table, make a list of everyone in the “reminders list” view) - WORKS
Second Action: repeat for each in “list of records” (from above), send email. “To” field token is “list of email” from the “find records” source - SENDS MULTIPLE
I think the problem is that, while it’s sending the email to everyone on the list individually as a “to,” it’s also copying all of us automatically (even though I don’t have anything selected in the CC field). When I’ve tried using the “base structure” source’s “field values” of the email field (which is an email field, not plain text), I get an error that the input is invalid. Any ideas what I should do to set up this automation?
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Hey @sarahschoon,
It sounds like the issue might be in the Second Action.
Instead of using the repeating group with the send email action inside, you can remove the repeating group and just use the send email action. In the “To” field you would still use “list of email”
@BuildForAT, that does seem like it would work better, but all four of us are still automatically being CC’d to the reminders. (screen shot of preview included in case it’s helpful). When I go to the CC field, nothing is there, so I can’t remove anything.
Great! We’re making progress.
If you want to eliminate the CC list, we’ll do something else instead. We’ll go back to having that repeating group with the send email action. But now, in the “To” field, we’ll put in “Current Item” and select their email:
This should send a separate email to each member.
Let me know if that gets you what you want.
This happens because when you use "Find records" and then send an email to the whole list, Airtable ends up sending multiple emails to each person.
To fix it, use the “Repeat for each record” step, and in the email action, make sure the “To” field pulls the email from the current record, not the full list. Each member row should have just one email linked to it, so this way each person only gets one email.
Double-check that CC and BCC are empty too, just in case.
re: all four of us are still automatically being CC’d to the reminders. (screen shot of preview included in case it’s helpful). When I go to the CC field, nothing is there, so I can’t remove anything.
Ah this is expected actually. Assuming you have 2 addresses in the ‘To’ input, e.g. jerry@test.com and george@test.com
Then when Jerry opens their email, this is what they’d see
And this what George would see:
Assuming your automation’s set up like this, then that’s going to be sending out one email to every email you’ve found and you won’t need to worry about the CC field:
If you don’t want them to be able to see who else is getting the emails, then BuildForAT’s solution will get you sorted
@BuildForAT and @Taha-Jiruwala thanks for your help! This seemed like it would work, but a new problem has come up: it now is only identifying the top person on the list (which currently has four names/emails). So it isn’t CCing anyone, but it isn’t recognizing anyone else on the list, either.
This is what my “To” field token looks like:
And then this is what options I have in the generated preview:
Thoughts? I feel like there’s something very obvious I’m doing wrong but I can’t for the life of me figure out what.
That looks fine; you’re using the output within a Repeated Group action so seeing one email only is expected. Try running the automation by triggering it (not testing it) and you’ll see that it sends one email per found record
@TheTimeSavingCo as I said from the beginning, it is actually sending multiple emails to each person every time, not just showing it in the preview but when I run the test. What you showed above makes sense in theory, but is not what’s happening in real time on my end...which is why I am trying to crowd source.
Hey @sarahschoon,
This setup that you did looks right in my eyes:
(Even though it might look confusing in the preview)
When you run it for real does it still send multiple emails to the same person? If so, let us know so we can brainstorm some more.
The images you shared look correct to me, but if it’s not working on your end, I’ll need more information to help.
If possible, please share a read-only link to your Airtable base. That way, I can take a closer look at your setup and figure out what might be going wrong. From the screenshot alone, everything appears to be set up properly.
Hmm, yeah, I think I don’t understand something about your setup, hopefully one of the other can help you solve your issue. As a reference, I’ve set up an automation here that has an automation that:
Has a ‘Find record’ step that looks for every record that has an ‘Email’ value
A repeating group that uses the results of that Find Record step
