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Email: Send a Form

Use this action to send a web-form via email to someone not part of your PagerDuty Workflow Automation team. The form can be used to collect information from the people that it is sent to.

Only 1 person can complete each emailed form. Any additional people who open the same form from the email link will receive a form completed page.

✅   Heads-up: If an email address you choose for the email recipient is an email recognized on your PagerDuty Workflow Automation team, this action will instead assign a task, rather than send an email. The task that is assigned is equivalent to using the Assign task to a person action.

Use Case

This action can be like a survey or for general data collection, particularly from non-team members. This task is helpful to use when you need to obtain a variety of information. For example,

  • Requesting information from a new hire in an onboarding process
  • Post-meeting surveys
  • Vendor request, placing an order, or returning an item within procurement

How to configure this action

The maximum number of recipients between To:, CC:, and BCC: is 50.

Fields for this action

  • To address

    • A specific email address or a reference field from a prior task or instance. The to address is required.
    • ✅   Heads-up: If an email address you choose for the email recipient is an email recognized on your PagerDuty Workflow Automation team, this action will instead assign a task, rather than send an email. The task that is assigned is equivalent to using the Assign task to a person action.
  • CC

    • Add any email addresses in a comma separated list to include in the CC. This is useful for notifying someone of the task, like for compliance or mailing lists.
  • BCC

    • Add any email addresses in a comma separated list to include in the BCC. This is useful for sending emails to large mailing lists where the list should remain private.
  • Sender name

    • The name of the company or person this email is coming from. The sender name is not required.
  • Email subject

    • The email reference line. The email subject is required.
  • Email body

    • The message in the email describing what the form is for. This is different than the form instructions. The email body is not required.

    • 💡   Tip: Use Markdown to format the email body with bold, italics, links, images, headers, and more. Conditionally displaying text is also supported.

    • Set a custom footer for an email, such as including an unsubscribe link. This field supports markdown.
  • Attachments

    • Any documents for the recipient. This may include guidelines, necessary data, or templates to complete. Attachments are not required
  • Custom Reply-To Email Address

    • By default, replies to the email sent by this action are added as comments on the run.
    • Enter an email address to instead have replies sent to a custom reply-to address. If a custom reply-to email address is used, replies are not added as a comment on the run.
  • Form title

    • The title will be at the top of the form once “Get Started” is selected from the email. The form title is not required.
  • Form instructions

    • This will appear at the top of the form, underneath the title and above the first field.

    • 💡   Tip: Use Markdown to format the instruction field with bold, italics, links, images, headers, and more. Conditionally displaying text is also supported.

  • Mark complete on bounce

    • Select True or False from the drop down to choose how the task is handled if an email cannot be delivered.
      • Select True to mark this task complete when the email cannot be delivered.
      • Select False or leave blank to leave the task open so that the web form can be completed manually or the instance canceled.

    💡   Tip: Bounce output fields are added to the task when an email bounces. Automated bounce handling can be configured by using the bounce output fields in task conditions.

  • Success redirect URL

    • Redirect users to a specific URL if the form is submitted successfully. For example, https://example.com
  • Error redirect URL

    • Redirect users to a specific URL if there is an error when the form is submitted. For example, https://example.com
  • Not found redirect URL

    • Redirect users to a specific URL if there is a 404 error when the form is submitted. For example, https://example.com
  • Hide header

    • Set to True to hide the default web form header. This is especially helpful when embedding a form in another page or site.
    • The header contains the logo set in the team or web form.
  • Disable submit

    • You can disable the submit button on a web form to create a “mini-website”. This is great for hosting information like a schedule, list of links, instructions, or event details.
    • Check the customize and add features to web forms article for more details.
  • Query parameters

    • Query parameters are another way to control web form settings like Hide footer or Success redirect URL. It’s also possible to auto-populate fields with query parameters.
    • Query parameters require a specific syntax, for example ?field-fieldname=13 or ?hide-footer=true&hide-header=true.
  • Favicon

    • You can set a custom favicon for your web form. Favicons are tiny icons used to represent a web site in a browser window or tab. Check out this article on favicons for more details.
    • To add a favicon, provide a fileID or URL. Check this tip on how to find a file ID
  • Permissions

    • Set who can find, view, or submit this web form. By default, web forms are public. You can set permissiosn to Public, Internal, Confidential, and Email Recipients. See How to set permissions on a web form for more details.
  • Output Field Prefix

    • To help keep output fields organized, choose an output field prefix to add to the beginning of each output field name as this action may output more than one field.
    • The step’s name is used as the prefix by default.

What will this output?

Bounce output fields are added to the task when an email bounces. Automated bounce handling can be configured by using the bounce output fields in task conditions.

This action may generate multiple fields. To help keep output fields organized, the prefix above will be added to the beginning of each of the output field names, separated by two dashes. Each field will result as:{{output-field-prefix--output-field}}. Learn more

Output fields for this action

  • To

    • A list of all recipients of the email a form task.
    • The full URL of the wb form sent by this action. For example, https://yourteam.pushbot.com/webforms/ca4d0d49c1c7a2fe13a7756c87ebfd66acb3ef8281026d858e465a144cc1fb4a
  • Web form ID

    • The ID of the wb form sent by this action. For example, ca4d0d49c1c7a2fe13a7756c87ebfd66acb3ef8281026d858e465a144cc1fb4a

Additional Output fields if an email bounces

  • Email bounced

    • A TRUE or FALSE response for whether or not an email bounced.
  • Bounced email address

    • A list of all the email addresses where the email bounced.
  • Bounce message

    • This will capture the message returned by the addresses where the email bounced.
  • Bounce type

    • The bounce type for the bounced email.

Get help with a problem or question

If something’s not working as expected, or you’re looking for suggestions, check through the options below.

Why are the bounce fields always empty?

After an email is sent, if it bounces this action normally returns extra output fields like: Email bounced, Bounced email address and Bounce message.

A common reason why these fields may not appear or appear blank is if the process ends before the email bounces. If an email is opened or bounces after the process ends, the fields cannot be updated.

To avoid this, add a task with a delay after the email task, or set up the Workflow so this task is not the last task in a process.

Why are my emails not sending?

If you get the bounce message “PagerDuty Workflow Automation has sent too many emails to this address recently. Please try again later”:

  • PagerDuty Workflow Automation limits the number of emails you can send to a single email address to 100 emails per hour. Exceeding that amount, under all circumstances, will trigger this message.

  • If you have a business case that requires you to send over 100 emails an hour to a single recipient, please contact PagerDuty Support.

If you have the comment on the instance, “PagerDuty Workflow Automation did not send your email … because an email with the exact same subject and body was sent to this address within the last hour.”:

  • PagerDuty Workflow Automation has an built-in spam prevention system to limit unintentional duplicate emails—this is intended to help avoid accidental spam, or embarrassing duplicates.

  • This error occurs if an email with an identical body and subject line has been sent to the same email address within the last hour. To send the exact same email, wait an hour.

  • To bypass the spam protection, see How do I bypass the spam protection altogether?.

If you have the comment on the instance, “PagerDuty Workflow Automation did not send your email … to [addresses] because … have a history of bouncing”:

  • If prior emails have repeatedly bounce for a given email address, that address will be added to our blacklist to prevent sending messages inadvertently. This message indicates that PagerDuty Workflow Automation skipped sending the message because past messages repeatedly bounced.
  • If you know the issue that causes the bounce is fixed, you can email support to ask for the email to be removed from the blacklist.
My email action is assigning a task instead, why is that?

If the email address you choose for the email recipient is an email recognized on your PagerDuty Workflow Automation team, this action will instead assign a task, rather than send an email. The task that is assigned is equivalent to using the Assign task to a person action.

I got a “Recipient count exceeds 50 “ fix task

This is a fixed limit on email actions. Each email action is capable of sending to up to 50 total recipients across To:, CC:, and BCC:.

  • For example, you could have 20 addresses in TO:, 15 addresses in CC:, and 15 addresses in BCC:, but no more. Even 1 extra address in any field would hit the limit.

If you need to send an email message to more than 50 recipients, you can spilt your recipient list into groups of 50 recipients or less, then send separate messages to each group.

How do I bypass the spam protection altogether?

To bypass the spam prevention, make each email unique. For example, add the Run Start Date to each email—this globally available field includes the start date in 2020-01-22T16:35:55.342Z format. This will ensure all emails are sent, even if all other content is the same.

💡   Tip: To make the date format more readable, use the Dates: Format a date time action with a format like D/M/Y HH:mm:ss.

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