I’m the guy who posted that earlier question – same as the question you have now. I clicked back to it and I see that it’s closed because (it claims) the issue was resolved. I don’t recall the issue being resolved.
I just looked at this again. I came up with a kind of workaround:
- Create a date+time field called (say) “Update Sent”.
- Configure the first step of the automation so it is triggered when THAT field has been modified/updated.
- Have the automation send an email (with whatever content you want).
Now the way it works is, user clicks into the Update Sent field, gets a calendar dropdown and clicks the “Today” button. That enters the current date/time (so you now have a record of when the update email was sent). And because clicking into a date/time field like this and selecting “Today” is a single event (unlike typing a bunch of letters), the field is only updated once, and thus only 1 email will be sent.
Of course this isn’t perfectly satisfactory. The email part is automated, but the triggering part isn’t. So user has to know to click on that field and update it by clicking ‘Today’. No change in that field, no email. The other reason this isn’t super satisfactory is that it’s possible for somebody to trigger the sending of an email without actually changing the record.*
By the way, I thought perhaps I could finesse the problem by editing the trigger field in a form. Web form, maybe (didn’t try that). But a normal Airtable data-entry form (what you get when you hit spacebar with a record selected), nope. Still sends multiple emails.
William
