Duplicate Emails from Automations

Yeah, I think you're like the third person I've seen talking about this; might want to open a support ticket directly with Airtable!

Yes, tragically, there are currently several different critical bugs with Airtable’s email automations. This is affecting me personally, and it is also affecting most of my Airtable consulting clients as well.

Be sure to report this major bug by sending an email to support@airtable.com.

In the meantime, until Airtable fixes these bugs, you have some options to workaround this:

1. Use Airtable’s Send Gmail action.
2. Use Airtable’s Send Outlook Email action.
3. Use any of Make’s email automations for Airtable, which includes Gmail, Microsoft 365 email (Outlook), the generic email (IMAP) option, and many more.

Check out this thread on how to trigger a Make automation instantly from Airtable.

p.s. If your company has a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

I'm emailing support, but I'm adding a note that this is happening to me, too. Unfortunately, I can't connect Gmail or Outlook, so I'm stuck sending our members duplicate messages until this is resolved, but I wanted to amplify that it's a real bug

Yeah, this is a major problem that is happening with all of my Airtable consulting clients as well.

Do you have a different IMAP email service that you can connect to (besides Gmail or Outlook)? If so, you can use Make's generic email automations.

In case others experiencing the issue find this thread, here's the reply I received from Airtable support: "It seems to be happening for other users as well, unfortunately. We have raised this issue internally and hopefully, a fix will be in order soon."

They recently had an update with their To and CC fields to align with Google and yahoos Rules for To and CC.

They have no other information yet. 

I've been experiencing this issue for a while now as well. It's unbelievable that this has been happening since March! I've also submitted a support ticket, but the problem still persists.

This is the - fast - response I've got from support:

Thank you for reaching out about the behavior of the Send Email action in automations. Due to security changes from Google and Yahoo, our engineers had to make an update to our Send Email messages that modified how email addresses are presented in the To: and CC: columns to remain compliant with these platforms.

Now, the individual recipient of an email will see their own email address in the To: column of the email. Other addresses that were listed under the To: and CC: columns of your automation action will appear to recipients as a list under the CC: element.

The email preview has been updated so that you can select a specific recipient to see what the email will look like to that particular recipient. Your automation's run history will still display the email addresses as expected in the To:, CC:, and BCC: columns. It'll just present the email order differently to email recipients in their inboxes.

We want to assure you that, despite the order of To: and CC: email addresses changing around, email recipients will still receive emails from the Send Email action and will receive the email only once, even though the preview may make it seem like they will receive the email more than once. Please also know that email addresses in the BCC field will never be exposed to any of the folks in the To: and CC: fields. We apologize for the confusion this causes and for any interruptions this may cause your workflow, but appreciate your support with these compliance updates.

Yeah, that’s their standard form letter response, but there is no indication on Google’s site that anything has changed on their end — and no other apps outside of Airtable have changed their email behavior.

For even more proof that nothing has changed on Google’s side, you can use the Gmail action in Airtable’s automations, and it still works just fine.

This just seems like a poorly implemented change on Airtable’s end. The primary solutions to workaround this are to use the Gmail action, the Outlook action, or Make’s email automations.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant