🆕 Action · Send email · Workflow Automation

:sparkles: Send email :sparkles: is now available as an additional action in Supercharged Workflow Automations.

Overview

The “Email action” allows you to send emails.

A simple use case

“When a record is updated (Trigger) and if the status changes to “done” (Filter) then send an email to a customer (Action)”.

Some more insights

Add your own custom branding and sent emails via your own email account.

Create automation using the action “Send email”

  • First automation block - Trigger - the “When this happens” automation statement

    • Choose a trigger, for example When a record is updated
    • Set the trigger by selecting the app where the automation should be triggered
  • Second automation block - Filter - the “And if conditions are met” automation statement

    • Set your filter to start actions only if certain conditions are met:
      • A field to be evaluated, at the first dropdown menu
      • An operator at the second dropdown menu, i.e., Contains, Does not contain, Is not, etc.
      • A field value - enter the field value for the selected field from the first dropdown. Note that the operators e.g. “is empty” and “is not empty” do not require you to input a field value
  • Third automation block - Action - the “Then do that” automation statement

    • Click on + Add action and choose between various actions
    • Set up your action based on the action you’ve selected, like Send email in the simple example above
    • This will bring up the action with configuration options to add recipients, a subject line, and the message body. Your automation can send out a custom message. Set up your email body using variables via @-menu, emojis, rich text, and plain text. You can also enter your HTML email template as source code.
    • Click Show more fields that allows you to configure “cc” “bcc” “from name” “reply to” and “attach files”. With the option “account” you can add your own email account by clicking Add account
  • Click on Create automation at the top right

Edit and manage actions

The automation editor allows you to edit or manage actions and holds all the important details about your specific automation. To open the editor - click the card with the title of your automation at the gallery of the automation center. From this point, you can choose between various options. Learn more about →


New to workflow automation by Tape? Here’s a summary of what you need to know about automation.

To enable any type of automation, you’ll need to set up a trigger and one or more actions. Some automations also use filters.

  • A trigger is an event that starts an automation. The “When this happens” statement. For example, “When a status changes” Learn more about → 1
  • Filters are optional and start actions only if certain conditions are met. The “And if conditions are met” statement. For example, "only if the status changes to done" Learn more about →
  • An action is an event the automation performs automatically after it is triggered. The “Then do that” statement. For example, “then send an email to a customer” Learn more about →

Check out how to create an automation →

1 Like

Hi there!
Is there any way to leave a comment to a record based on the email I received from this automation?
Best regards,
Joschka

1 Like

Hi @joschkalang,

could you provide a little more details on what you would like to achieve? Are you dispatching an email via the automations, and would like to add that same content as a comment to the record?

Thank you
Tim

Hi @Tim ,
Use case as following: I’m sending out an email with, let’s say data about amount, measurements and weight of palletts to a carrier as a pick-up order.
He wouldn’t need to log in to Tape but gets all the information that are neccessary for him within the email and could then reply to this exact email to confirm the pick-up or leave questions.

Since we can’t ask Dachser or DB Schenker to log in to Tape (well we could ask but they’ll probably won’t to it) we need some way to get in touch with them without leaving tape.

We have a ton of use cases like this, hope that made it clearer.

1 Like

@joschkalang,

totally understood. Here’s what you could to with the tools available right now in Tape-

  1. Create another app “Replies” (add at least a single text and a multi text field) and leverage the “email to app” feature described here:
  1. Copy that email to app email address and use it as “Reply to” for your send email action inside your workflow automation. This will ensure that all replies will create a record in your app “Replies”.

Now you have a basic way of at least collecting the replies in Tape. What you know could do, is to add a unique ticket number to the subject line of the original sent email, and match that again when the reply comes in. A little bit of scripting may be required there - hit me up if this version here could solve your real world problem - we will then create a fully fledged example for you including the code snippets involved.

If you want to integrate yes/no answers like confirmations as buttons in an email where a click on an option of your carrier directly sets a status in a record you can use the Create web link action in combination with the Web linked clicked trigger.

But if you want to process individual replies to emails in the automatios we would need the Email reply trigger, which we haven’t rolled out yet because we haven’t had enough demand from customers for it yet. But feel free to make a feature request then we can prioritize higher in the roadmap.

Let us know!

Cheers
Tim

Hi all,
I would like to know where do we configure the email account(s) that we will later use to send these emails. And then, my real question is if we can use several (also how many) different email accounts to send emails from various accounts depending on the situation.

This is an example to illustrate the use case.
Imagine that I want to send an email from a no-reply general account just to notify certain things in a given situation (for example upon order fulfillment). It would be very nice to be able to configure this besides my email account to then build some nice automations on top of this.

Thanks.
R.J.

1 Like

Another straightforward use case would be to be able to configure sort of a central email reception app for where there are some automations in place so that certain emails can be redirected and assigned to the person in charge depending on given variables. Then if this is a type x email assign to y account under n situation, in would be nice to be able to trigger an automated reply from that y account.

Thanks.
R.J.

Hi @R.J,

very good news, we have invested a lot of time in the Send email action to solve exactly the problems you described.
You can change the send account directly in the action when you click on Show more above the email body and add as many as you want via SMTP.
You can also change existing ones so that this account will be changed for all automations where you have used them.

So you can send from as many email accounts as you want, you can also use the conditional action to add an if statement so you can use one or the other email action with different accounts depending on the conditions.

Your auto reply use case can currently implement with the email to app function and the record create trigger.

Cheers
Leo

1 Like

wow @Leo thanks a lot. I feel like whaaaaat, I totally missed that one. :rofl:

That little “show more” was hidden in plain sight!! I think I might have been going by each time, just seeing the message box. :joy:

Thanks for your thorough explanations and for investing time in these nice features.

I would like to know if there are any specific limits to email sizes in these features, or attachment sizes, or any other specific limit for these really. Are there any or do the general email limits apply?

How would you approach a set of automations in the case we want to build upon the “if the client replies” then and start kind of a drip email scheme (not a drip campaign) but more in the if the client says this then that (and derivatives where the email is routed to different people)?

Also is there a way to “blind” the app address to reply to so the clients don’t see these Tape addresses? I have kind of a workaround in mind for this but just want to know some other opinions.

Thanks.
R.J.

1 Like

Hi again and sorry if I am asking too many questions. :pray:

On top of the other questions, I was wondering if there is a way to have some pre-canned or ready made templates to compose an email automatically to just review it and then send it, everything happening inside Tape. This would also allow to plug in some AI to prepare replies (allowing access just to the email for example, or just certain emails) (this may arise privacy concerns).

I’m just talking about something “simple” like this:
An email arrives to Tape → it gets filtered and triggers template reply → pre-canned reply gets composed → we just have to check the reply then send it.

I know this is simpler said than done, and this has a ton of variables and possibilities, but just wanted to ask. This could really save lots of time, even with the simplest version to template common answers.

There probably could be a workaround by building an app to copy emails and execute some other app with the templates depending on the rules set. But what about the compose then send part (with the thread context to check consistency, etc.)? Well, technically probably we could as well kind of workaround that part building more apps and some buttons to press and send. But I’m asking if there is or will be a better native way that feels more natural and is easier to setup.

I don’t know if it would be better to create a Q/A post for this question, sorry if this is not the best place but I felt that this adds to the “send email” conversation. :sweat_smile:

Thanks.
R.J.

1 Like

Thank you very much for the great feedback @R.J

Oh yes on the show more we have in many actions to show the features for the pro users. So you should activate it :sweat_smile:

We have not set any limits that should hit you. The limits mostly come from the email service you have connected via SMTP. If you still hit a limit then contact us at any time.

Currently I would use the email address of an inbox app in Tape in the reply to address. If you don’t want your clients to see the Tape address, you can also use an address of yours and then set up a forwarding from there to the inbox app address. Depends on your email provider how you can set this up.

As soon as emails arrive you can use the create record trigger to start another automations and filter by any criteria to trigger appropriate responses.

You can work completely with variables in the email action, which gives you a lot of flexibility.
You can even work with variables in the sender of the email field. You only need an SMTP account that has the right to send emails on behalf of other senders.

Your idea with the templates and the AI is already successfully implemented by some of our partners and users. You can use almost any professional email template that you can find on the web as an email template and then just customize the text or add variables.
My colleague Ben has written a guide that you have already found:

You can then use any AI interface with a webhook to create intelligent replies. Which you can then use in the email response.
For this you can use the HTTP request or the script action. Here the following guide could help you:

To your question with the different templates.
If there are a lot of templates you could work as an alternative to a template app with “When an automation calls” trigger.
With this you can save all different email templates in simple automations that only do the sending and call one or the other automation as needed from the triggering and filtering one. With this you have the additional advantage that every single sent email is processed in the logs and you can also connect an error handling. Furthermore it is much easier to keep track of all template variants.

It is best to start with a use case that currently causes the most workload manually and then expand it further and further.

Cheers
Leo

Hi @Leo,
Thanks a lot for your extensive and comprehensive reply. All your thoughts are really appreciated. :smiley:

For the templates idea, the question was more into the possibilities of just composing the email not sending it directly. If there was/is some more natural way (instead of various apps workaround) and/or is planned to “compose a draft” that we can later decide to modify, send directly or dismiss. So instead of having an automation that sends an email reply directly (with or without llm in the process), a way to have just a draft reply composed to examine it later on manually.

Thanks a lot for all your explanations (I already envisioned kind of the same idea for the templates app so it is very nice to double check this idea).

1 Like

@R.J I think this shows what you were asking about:

When you press a button a draft reply is generated (this could be done automatically), then you can check the draft and once happy press the button to send the email.

2 Likes

Hi @Jason,
Wow, I’m astonished with you generous contribution! Please receive a thousand thanks for taking the time to put this together and then showing it here. I really appreciate this. :smiley:

This is very nice and it is almost as I envisioned the workaround. I guess I have to give it more thoughts since I have several “routes” this solution could take and I have to evaluate what would be the best fit.
When I asked Leo for a more “natural way” of doing this, I was wondering if there was a more interface-integrated way of seamlessly plug all the communications with a client inside a “client’s page” with integrated email to reply directly (and/or create some AI driven drafts). So when I asked I was thinking about something that could display directly inside a clients profile app instead of creating a specific app for emails with clients. But after revisiting the idea I started having doubts since having all the comms inside a “client’s page” could potentially and severly clutter the interface in itself. So I started thinking that the workaround could maybe even be a better idea. I could as well put some “status, check or summary” regarding emails (and/or communications in general) in the client’s page while maintaining a fully-fledged communications app separately.

I have yet to test more things and give some more thoughts to take a decision on the route to take for this. Anyways, your help and kindness sharing this is deeply appreciated Jason. Thanks a lot again.

You rock Jason!! :raised_hands:

1 Like

Hi @R.J,

Thanks for your kind words, and no problem at all. I’ve got a few suggestions that might give you more ideas:

  1. Incoming emails are automatically linked to the relevant contact record, and subsequently, to the corresponding organisation. This ensures that they’re neatly listed in the contact record.

  2. Each incoming email is categorised using AI.

  3. Emails undergo a spam check against a database, and if a match is found, they’re promptly deleted.

  4. Occasionally, I find the need to compose emails in languages other than English, or add a different language as a greeting or closing. Moreover, not all emails require the same tone or serve the same purpose. To address this, a separate application could be developed specifically for email generation based on specific choices. These ‘drafts’ could then be linked back to the original email. This segregation into a separate app ensures that the email record remains uncluttered with options that aren’t frequently used. Additionally, it opens up the possibility of generating draft emails directly from a contact record.

I hope this gives you some food for thought!

Cheers,
Jason

Hi @Jason,
Thanks a lot for these additional suggestions! :smiley: