Avoid duplicates in Airtable automations

[Jentech]

Hey Airtable community,

I hope someone can help me 🙂 

I am having a table in airtable with different projectflows in each record. In a collumn of the record the email of the respective POC is entered. Once a month the POC is asked to update different other information in the records. For this I would like to send a monthly reminder to all POCs who have not updated their records yet. 

I have managed to create an automation which filters which records are updated and which not and then sends out an email to the list of email adresses of the records which need a reminder. 

My problem is, that some POCs are responsible for multiple records and would get multiple reminders. But I would only like ONE email to be send to each POC. So if an email duplicates (or more) I would like it to be used only once. 
Does somebody know, who I can do that ? 🙂 

Thanks in advance. 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm if I were you I would convert the field that contains those emails into a linked field to a new table.  I would then add a conditional rollup / lookup field that would indicate whether there were any records linked to that email address that needed to be updated

I would then have an automation that would run once a month that looks in this new table of emails, checks that rollup / lookup field to see whether that email address is linked to any records that need updating, and email that list of people, does that make sense?

[Jentech]

Hey @TheTimeSavingCo  Adam, 

yes thank you, that makes sense. Do you think there is another option then creating a total new table?

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, the only thing that comes to mind would be using a script I'm afraid

[James3]

I came across this thread looking for a slightly different answer, but my issue answers your question:

I have an automation which finds all records matching a condition (due date on or before today, not completed), and sends an email reminder of tasks that should have been completed.  In my current test, there's 92 matching records, each with two assignees.  The preview makes it look like both people would received the same summary email 92 times, and their names are in the "To:" field 92 times when they receive it, but only one email is received by each user.

It appears Airtable (or the receiving email server? unlikey) is clever enough to deduplicate the To: field before sending.  Which is nice!