Help attaching an. ics file to a confirmation email

​@ChristyNavarro,

Fastest Path: Store the ICS file(s) in a publicly accessible folder and use an in-text hyperlink within the body of the email using markdown.

I’ve also used outlook calendar integration to create then “update” a calendar item with each new registration, but it doesn’t sound like you have time for this at the moment.

Hope that helps!
AG

Is the .ics file being generated somewhere, potentially introducing delay into the email automation?

I have an active automation sending responses with a .ics attached from a linked table and it works just fine… Another common error is not updating and testing your automation trigger and actions, so that it won’t work when you’re testing. 

If you’re using Google Cal or Outlook, you can integrate either directly with Airtable and just create an automation to update an event, adding the client/patient email to the Attendees field when you’re ready (with trigger conditions to match the “ready”/”confirmed” state) so they receive a calendar invite—.ics file and all. 

If we’re talking something different—I’m not sure how the .ics files are being generated, but if you’re creating them yourself and able to save them to your computer, something like this could work:

1. Create a new table in your base (“ics files”)
2. Add a linked record field to this new table that will link to the record from which you’re triggering the confirmation email
3. Add an attachment field for the .ics file

[Please note that I recommend duplicating your current automation and applying the following steps to the duplicate version, just to make it easier to clear this out in case it doesn’t work for your use case.]

From here, the steps will depend a little bit on your trigger for the confirmation email, but if we assume that you add a condition where the automation won’t fire until the linked ics record and/or the lookup field for the .ics file is/are not empty, here’s the rest:

5. Add a look up action before your email action
6. You’re going to set it to find a record in the “ics files” table based on the condition where [Insert Name of Linked Record Field Here] has any of →
7. Click the gear to the right, set to Dynamic so you see the blue +. (See below.)

8. Click the blue + icon, select the trigger step, and select Airtable record ID (should be  towards the top).
9. Test the new/modified steps with a record that has a test record linked (from “ics files”) and a test .ics file attached.
10. If you go into your email action step, you should now be able to go to the Attachments menu (below the message body), select the record found in the “Find records” step, and select the attachment field. 
11. To test: set the recipient of the email of the automation to yourself (i.e. manually put your own email in there for now as a static value) and “Run as configured” to hopefully send an email to yourself with your test .ics file attached.
12. Provided everything worked, restore the email recipient to whatever it was previously, and turn the automation on. Make sure the original you duplicated from is turned off!

Since it sounds like you have two different automations for Zoom vs. in-person, you should be able to add these steps pretty easily to both. You could also just add an Attachments field directly to the main table and drop the .ics file(s) in there, but since I don’t know precisely how your base is structured and how the automations are built (mainly how it determines whether to send a Zoom or in-person invite), adding the additional table feels like the safer bet.