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Best answer

Facebook Messenger to Gmail not pulling in names

  • 5 February 2020
  • 7 replies
  • 132 views
O
Userlevel 3

Hi,

I have made a Zap that is meant to send all new Facebook Page messages to my Gmail account. Everything is working as expected but the names are not being pulled in from messenger. Only the time and actually message are being pulled in. I have checked the task history and I can see they are not being pulled in from messenger, so there is no error with gmail. Any idea how to fix this? It's for my company and we need it fixed soon!!

Cheers


icon

Best answer by jesse 10 February 2020, 16:43

View original
This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

7 replies

AndrewJDavison_Luhhu
Userlevel 7
Badge +10



If it's the latter, a screenshot of what you see would be useful.


We're Zapier Certified Experts - we help businesses do cool stuff with automation | www.luhhu.com
O
Userlevel 3

Hi there,

Yes, I am having real issues with this one!

So this is what I am getting:


Screen Shot 2020-02-06 at 11.59.35 am.pngSo basically the only thing coming through is the text of the message. I was told by someone else that users need to opt-in so their user info can be shared, they sent me this article: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/user-profile/#optin

But it clearly says users opt-in to sharing such information by "starting the conversation by sending a message."

So we should be able to see the name? Why would this be a Zapier feature if it does not work?

Just very confused...


Cheers


O
Userlevel 3

To add to the above, I do have an instant greeting on in the messenger settings. Will this somehow affect my Zap's ability to retrieve user info?



AndrewJDavison_Luhhu
Userlevel 7
Badge +10

So @OWilde99

Firstly, what I'll do is flag this for someone at the Zapier Community team to look at. They might have some more insight on this or will flag it for support to check out if needed.

On a wider note, this might not be a Zapier issues, but rather a Facebook one. Given that "sender_full-name" exists means that Zapier can pull that value, but the other side of this is that Facebook needs to supply that.

My guess here is there is some sort of further privacy restriction, perhaps in your Facebook set up, or in the settings of individual users that's restricting this. Facebook change the goal posts with privacy rules all the time... it's not always possible for apps to keep up.

Let's hope Zapier HQ can shed some light here.


We're Zapier Certified Experts - we help businesses do cool stuff with automation | www.luhhu.com
Danvers
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @OWilde99, I've done some digging in our notes and it looks like there are some circumstances where we can't get the user information. @AndrewJDavison_Luhhu is right in that it depends on the permissions that we receive from Facebook.

In the Facebook developer notes it says that permission will be granted in the following circumstances:

  • The person starts the conversation via a welcome screen and tapped the "Get Started" button.
  • The person starts the conversation by clicking a "Send to Messenger" button.
  • The person starts the conversation by sending a message.
  • The person starts the conversation by accepting a Page's message request.
  • Your Messenger bot uses the askPermission() function of the Messenger Extensions SDK in the webview to ask for the user_profile permission.

And some circumstances where permission wont be given are the following:


I hope that helps to clear up what might be happening here!

I've also passed this information onto the team that looks after help documentation so that it can be added to the Facebook Messenger help page.


O
Userlevel 3

Thanks @Danvers and @AndrewJDavison_Luhhu

Yes, it is very confusing! I have already read the documentation on FB with regards to opting in to share the user info. It does say that one of the ways a user can opt in is to "start the conversation by sending a message"

So I have no idea what is wrong! I can't seem to find any settings which would prohibit this from working and I have received messages from multiple people all with names missing....

Thanks for the help anyway. Hopefully the Zapier team can help with this.




jesse
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Just wanted to close the loop on this thread based on our support team's insight into this issue.

Only certain methods of sending the message will include the opt-in for their profile information. Unfortunately we have no control over what data comes through into the Zap because we receive that passively from Facebook. We have an open feature request to find a way to get that data more consistently, so hopefully we'll have better ways of handling this in the future.


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