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Best answer

Infinite loop with Gmail + Discord webhook

  • 23 April 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1973 views
I

I have a zap set up to send a message to a Discord channel with the contents of an email whenever an email with the keyword “classroom” is received, so my class can receive updates from Google Classroom on Discord. Today, it just so happened that one such email was above 2000 characters, and Zapier was unable to send it due to Discord’s character limitations. Thus, an email was sent to warn me about this problem; however, this email also contained the “classroom” keyword, and also happened to be over 2000 characters, so another warning email was sent. This process repeated itself until I woke up with 94 emails in my inbox and changed the keyword. 

 

While this may be a problem that is easily fixable by the zap owner by modifying the keyword a bit, I believe there should be some sort of system in place to prevent this type of thing from happening. Three solutions I could think of off the top of my head would be:

  1.  Ignore emails from Zapier - however, some people may need these emails for their own reasons;
  1. Set a recursion limit - if you’ve sent 50 replies to the same email thread, it’s probably enough;
  1. When working with Discord messages, if the message is over 2000 characters long, split the message into chunks and send them one by one in their own separate messages.

 

Any thoughts on this? #3 is personally the solution I’m leaning towards.

icon

Best answer by jpot 23 April 2020, 22:48

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

3 replies

nicksimard
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Thanks @jpot for chiming in :) And @imhere, no worries — I’ve unmarked your answer and instead marked the one from jpot.

I

Hello jpot,

That is a great solution, thanks for sharing! I wasn’t aware of that feature, it seems very convenient. I had previously fixed it by narrowing down my filter, but this should work much better.

Thanks for all the work you do with Zapier! It was extremely easy to set the app up relative to doing it manually. :slight_smile:

 

Edit: Whoops, didn’t mean to mark my own reply as the answer.

jpot
Userlevel 4
Badge +5

Hello! Just an idea: you could to add a Formatter by Zapier step to your Zap. Use the Text action, then use Truncate to shorten incoming emails to something like 1800 characters. Sort of like this:

 

 

That should stop the emails from getting long enough to cause this problem in the first place. Is that helpful? 

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