Multiple Emails Sending from Automation - Doesn't Show up in Run Log

[Alicia_Berg]

I’ve encountered this problem a number of times now.

I have many automations set up for various projects. Seemingly randomly, some of my automations will rapid fire 10-20 emails to the recipients. These “runs” are not shown in the “run log.” It only shows that automation running one time. However, the email recipients receive multiple emails of the same record.

It’s a huge problem for us, as we are using these automations to run projects for our clients and I don’t want to spam their email inboxes.

Anyone else have this happen to them?

I have tried changes my trigger from a “matching conditions” to “entering a view” with a specific filter. No luck. Again, it doesn’t happen every time, only with certain records. At first, I thought maybe it was if the attachment file was too big, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Help please!

[Alicia_Berg]

I’m sorry you are experieing it too, but it does feel good to not be the only one having this issue. I will report back if I find any solutions.

Right now I am exploring the idea that it might be when the email attachment is greater than 10 or 15 MB. Do the emails from your automations have file attachments?? If so, could you check the duplicated email file attachment sizes?

this is some detective work :female_detective: :face_with_monocle: :thinking:

[Sarah_Farnswort]

Thanks! :slightly_smiling_face: Let me know if you have any theories or solutions!

For me the emails do have attachments. I’ve found a useful Mini Extensions plug in that can easily calculate the file size of any attachment fields in Airtable and populate a field with the size number which might be useful to you if you use Mini Extensions: Calculate Airtable Attachment File Sizes - miniExtensions for Airtable

I have gone through all 300+ report emails and as far as I can see this issue has only happened 8 times, 6 of which were in the last 48 hours, triggering a total of 53 dupe emails to the mailing list. In those 8 instances the size of attachments were as follows:

• 6.32MB (1 photo)
• 22.17MB (3 photos)
• 19.12MB (3 photos)
• 18.77MB (3 photos, 1 video)
• 9.97MB (3 photos)
• 22.68MB (3 photos)
• 7.90MB (3 photos)
• 20MB (5 photos)

While some of these file sizes are large, it’s not consistent. Over the past 48 hours there have been multiple reports submitted and emails triggered with more than 10-15MB that have sent successfully.

Previously when people have uploaded too many photos to the form, I have got an Automation Failed to Run email, and when reviewing the run history it has said “The total size of the message + attachments cannot exceed 25MB”, which would suggest it should handle up to 25MB.

These forms are submitted by many different people, but interestingly 4 out of the 8 reports that triggered the multiple emails were submitted by the same person. My pet theory is that they might be hitting submit on the form before the photos have finished uploading, which might explain why it happens more often for bigger attachment files but not consistently. Given that it’s happening for the one person repeatedly, perhaps it’s because their internet is slow…?

[Alicia_Berg]

Your theory might be onto something. When I met with @kuovonne, they mentioned that the attachment “process” is a multi-layered operation. It could be possible that it is somehow related to that - and it is getting tripped up somehow. I don’t have the proper technical language to explain it…but it sounds like we are all on the same page-ish.

Also, does the body of your email drastically change in length for your automations? I know the email itself is part of the byte transfer…so mayyyybe those smaller documents that are closer to 10MB could be pushed over the size trigger limit when combined with the email message body size?

I need to put in an email to the airtable support team and maybe they can help shed some more light on the issue.

In the meantime, I am going to set up a work around using that mini-extension to “flag” documents larger than 10MB to then send a different automation for large documents that sends a link to the attachment in the email body, instead of attaching the file to the email.