Automation error: "An attachment url is disallowed" when run automatically

[Thimo]

Hello everybody,

I have a weird problem with a gmail automation. When testing the automation works perfectly. The automation looks for a field value that is greater than 4 and then the actions are run.

When manually changing the a value in the record that is used for the automation to a value greater than 4 the automation also runs perfectly.

But when the automation its run automatically I suddenly get the following error in the logs:

It doesn’t make any sense that this automation suddenly throws errors when it is run automatically, but every other way of running it works fine. Also, when this same automation is run again manually it just works…

Someone any idea what’s going on?

[Christopher_Gri]

Hi Thimo,

I had exactly the same problem. In my case I think it was down to the automation attempting to send the email before the previous step had completed the upload of the attachment that took place in a script that I was running. To resolve the issue I created a new job to run after the previous one had finished, and a small time had elapsed to allow all of the file uploads to complete, that then changed the status to kick off the email send instead. This looks like it has fixed the problem.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Chris

[Thimo]

Hi Chris, thank you for your message!

This may also be the case for me, but I couldn’t find a solution for it back then. I ended up using the Airtable triggers in Zapier to recreate this automation and that worked perfectly! Also good to hear that you found another solution :slightly_smiling_face:

[Thomas_K_Runnin]

I think I found a great solution for this issue. At least it works great with a single attachment.

In my case I’m triggering an automation based on a record entering a “To send” view. Whenever it triggered automatically I got an error in the Gmail action step since the attachment had not finished uploading by the time the automation triggered.

Here’s what I did to fix it:

1. Created a Formula column that just printed the attachment column. Assume your attachment column is named “CV or resume” the formula would simply be {CV or resume}.
2. This column will print the name of the file as well as a URL to the file. The great thing is that the URL changes once the file has completed the upload. It goes from something like cv-2021.pdf (https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/3647r9w8s7e6rts47rt6) to cv-2021.pdf (https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/8f2a529ec648bc021421291078dad0ee/cc7c1241/cv-2021.pdf). So just add a filter for the formula column containing https://dl.airtable.com and you should be good to go.

See example video: Airtable PDF upload example...

Of course, this approach probably won’t work if the field has more than one attachment, as the first attachment is likely already uploaded. You could add another condition to exclude cdn.filestackcontent.com, however I’m not sure if that domain is always the same. I believe I’ve also spotted something starting with api. or something similar, but I can’t reproduce at the moment.

[Ashok_Sekar]

The way I solved is, I created views for the conditions. And added Automations on those views. Once the data gets inside a view based on some conditions ( used “When record enters view”). Directly applying conditions on an automation had the mentioned problem.