Send an Email automation is sending multiple conflicting emails

[pressGO_design]

Hi hi.

I'm stumped. I set up a ridiculously basic automation for a client to send an email at a scheduled time. It's set up as follows:

Trigger: at 9:00am on the 15th of the month
Action 1: Find Records that match a condition (billingStatus = Bill By Month)
Action 2: Using the records that were found in Action 1, send one email per record. Each email has my client's email address as both the bcc: and the Reply To email. 

The Run History shows that earlier today, the automation ran once and 4 emails were sent. But my client got 6 emails! 2 were correct and only were sent once = yay; 2 were sent to the same email address twice - one with the right information and one with the wrong information = boo. So it's not happening every time to every email.

The attached multipleEmails picture tries to tell the story of what my client sent me using yellow and blue arrows. The emailExample picture shows a redacted view of the automation run history: each client has only one email and that one email shows the correct info for the client.

I searched the forums (always a joy 🤪) and found something similar but that seemed to have been due to issues with attachments. I also found issues related to Outlook and Gmail - my client uses Gmail, but this uses the native Airtable email automation, not the Google one. Would changing to the Gmail automation help?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks so much,
Michele

[Sara]

Hi, are the hours calculated using a formula? If yes, that's the problem; the automation started and sent the email before the column "hours" had finished calculating the value. How can you solve this problem? You need something to slow the automation of the email, like a button that changes when the column hours are changed, and change the automation on "when the button is."

[pressGO_design]

There are no formulas involved. At 6am - so three hours before the automation is scheduled to run - there’s a find records automation that “wakes up” the base to force the sync. All the email automation does is take data from those synced records, plop it into the body of an email, and send it. 

[pressGO_design · Accepted solution]

Thanks to @TheTimeSavingCo, I discovered that the automations from the previous year's base were still on and triggering and I'm now both super-excited to have (hopefully!) found the problem and also kicking myself for not double-checking that base 🙄🙄🙄🙄😤😤😤😤

Ooof.