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Question

Group emails notification to avoid sending multiple emails of the same topic.

  • 29 June 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 281 views

Hello Community, 

 

       I have an existing Zap that looks like this: 

Zap Illustration
  1. In a scheduled basis, it sends an email to remind people (column email)  to fill up a column1 and column2 if they are blank. Pretty simple if you think about it. However, I would like to avoid sending duplicate email if the person responsible (email column) appear more than once in the row. In this example, I don’t want xyz to have 3 emails of the same topic. I just want to nudge the person to go in and fill those column up. How can I accomplish this? 
  2. In the similar case, I also have another zap that triggers when a new row is created, doing the same thing (Email the person) to fill the field. Same case, I don’t want zapier to send dup emails. 

Any help is appreciated. 

 

 

 

 

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4 replies

nicksimard
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hi @dianasy!

That’s a tricky one. The only thing I can think of, with the way you’ve currently got your Zap set up is a Code step that can remove duplicates. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar enough with Javascript or Python to offer that code. Maybe @Troy Tessalone can help?

There may be an alternate approach, but I have some questions.

  • How many possible email addresses might you have, that you need to send messages to?
  • Is it always from the same set of people?

I’m wondering if you can build a system that starts with everyone as a “has not filled in” and then as rows are added/updated in your main spreadsheet it finds the person and updates them. Then every week you check that other spot, to see who matches the “has not filled in” column.

Not sure if that makes sense. Jus trying to think outside the box :)

D
Userlevel 2

Thank you for your input @nicksimard ; i did initially looked at the duplicate email code in python and I have that snippet working. I think it is about making it work with the current flow. I choose this path (could change) because it was easier to export the file to csv and automate the check for empty cells. 

To answer your questions: 

  • How many emails ? say <100. 
  • Same set of people? Say dups are 30%
nicksimard
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hi @dianasy!

Oh, the code step I mentioned, I was envisioning it within the Zap. It could process the email addresses and remove duplicates. Again, that particular code is beyond my skill set. You mentioned you got some Python code working. Could that not be incorporated in the flow you’ve chosen?

Something like:

Trigger: Schedule by Zapier — Every Week
Action: Google Drive —Find a File
Action: Formatter — Get the CSV
Action: Code by Zapier — Remove Duplicates
Action: Looping by Zapier
...

The other idea I had won’t really be feasible I don’t think, given the number of email addresses. Also, it would be a pretty big departure from your current workflow.

jesse
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Hey @dianasy just checking in here! Were you try out Nick’s suggested workaround? How else can we help? Let us know!

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