Contacts lookup from multiple email addresses

[AlexW-DP]

Hello,

I have set up a zapier automation that, when an email in my gmail gets a particular label, will create a record in Airtable. Zapier will pass along the "to" email address(es) into one of the fields.  If there are multiple recipients on the email, the info is passed along as email1@test.com,email2@test.com with a comma separating the addresses. 

Here is my issue -- is there any way for me to set up an Airtable automation that will read those as two separate emails and then link this record with two contact records I have in Airtable?  I can make the Airtable automation work if the email was sent to a single recipient, but it cannot seem to recognize the comma as a separator in order to match/link multiple email addresses with multiple contacts.

Thanks for any suggestions

Alex

[ScottWorld]

In Airtable, you would likely need to write a Javascript to split up the email addresses by the comma.

It would probably be best to handle this on the Zapier end first, but I don't think that Zapier can handle this either. If you're not already too heavily invested in Zapier, I would strongly recommend switching to Make because Make can handle this natively for you. In Make, you would simply use the "split" function to split up the email addresses by the comma, which will then automatically give you an array of email addresses that you can put into your linked record field.

There can be a bit of a learning curve with Make, which is why I created this basic navigation video for Make, along with providing the link to Make’s free training courses.

Also, here are a few of the reasons why Make is superior to Zapier.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

If you're willing to set your Contacts table to have a primary field with the emails then you can just make your Zap put the email address into the linked field to the Contacts table and that should automatically link stuff up I think

You could also try converting that field that takes the emails into a multiple select field? Pasting data into that should then create new options, and you could make an automation that'll take the values of that multiple select field and use it as a repeating group action to find the correct record in Contacts and link them as needed

(I'm not 100% on whether the Zap will be able to create new options; I vaguely recall having done this succesfully in the past heh)

[AlexW-DP]

Thanks - that makes sense.  Can you help me understand how to use the Airtable automation to connect an array of email addresses to linked contact records?  The lookup automation does not seem to be able to do this, at least how I've configured it.  I've tried manually separating email addresses with a comma and space, a semi-colon, semi-colon and space, etc. and the lookup fails each time.  (Lookup works fine with a single email address).