This is thee best you can do with regard to email messages because Airtable has chosen to deeply sanitize all content in email bodies.
Oddly, Airtable has no issue with embedding their own brand and logo, while the rest of us are left to create brandless, mundane, and completely boring notifications. For my clients, I avoid [Airtable’s] email automation like I avoid Covid. Instead, I opt for 100% control through Gmail using Google Apps Script and tight integration processes.
The trick to control newlines and embedded (but extremely limited) markdown content in Airtable is to compose the entire message in a script variable and use it – AND ONLY IT – in the message body.
// compose a markdown email message...
let thisMessage = "Hi Martin!\n\n";
thisMessage += "This message includes an embedded link to [Global Technologies Corporation](http://globaltc.com), my website."
thisMessage += "Tux, the [Linux mascot](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NO5DEtDp8L59UHmhqQj55jlyBK_k31yZ/view?usp=sharing) \n\n";
thisMessage += "Cheers!\n\nbf..."
output.set("message",thisMessage)This is a deep topic that requires a host of supporting stuff and a few hours of documentation, so no. I am trying to get my team to package exactly such an example solution and publish it on Gumroad with a customer-decides-the-price model (like shareware). We hope to toss that over the way in a week or so.
Bear in mind, that I promote this as a remedy to lacklustre email and reporting support in Airtable for – and only for - processes that require pixel-precise reporting or communications. When brand and image matters, you’re not likely to achieve your objectives with off-the-shelf no/low-code automation crap. And I mean “automation crap” with the greatest respect; no company can do everything for everyone. There are many ways to achieve good communications from no-code platforms so my approach is not ideal in every situation. One reason I get calls to build this better crap is there are mitigating issues such as additional integrations with other SDKs, email analytics, email steps where human triage is required, etc.
The general approach is:
- When an email needs to be sent, use an Airtable action script to call a webhook.
- The webhook is a server running in your Gmail account as a script web service (Google Apps Script supports this for free).
- Your custom webhook service hears the call and uses the Airtable API to call back to get all the data for the email message.
- The script then binds the data/images and anything you desire using HTML with the message template and creates either a draft in your outbox that you can review/edit and send, or sends it immediately.
- Once the message is dispatched, the script uses the Airtable API to update the Airtable record relevant to the email event.
Might look like this…
Sadly, I believe this is not possible in Airtable’s native tools. But, it may be possible with Integromat. @ScottWorld can probably tell us.
