Email Reminders Based on an Email Field
Hello, I need to set up a reminder/notification/email or something in Quickbase that sends an email 6 months before a date stored in a record. The reminder should go to: • The email address i...
Forum Discussion
One way could be to use Pipelines to modify the record 6 months before the date (just make a new checkbox field to modify for example) and have a custom notification set up to send if record modified and that checkbox field is set.
Another way could be to create a "6 months before date" checkbox formula field. Create a report that filters to where that is true. Then set up a subscription to that report, it will only send when there's something true by default. If you need to send to non-QB users, you could have a group email and make a ghost account on the install that sends to that group email.
Probably some other tricks, but those are the two simplest ideas I have.
Thanks for this. The biggest part I am not sure about is how to send the reminder to an email in an email field. Any thoughts on that?
- MarkShnier__You
Qrew Legend
I agree with Denin and that you will have to do this with a notification and not a Subscription. Notifications can go to any email address, but subscriptions can only go to users in your app.
So what you do is you create a formula field on the record that calculates to be true if today is the day that the reminder needs to be sent. Then you have a scheduled pipeline which does a daily search for these records due to be sent and what I typically do is update a date time field to the current date time in the pipeline box. {{time.now}}, thus triggering the Notification.
I forget offhand if the new custom emails will send to non-user email addresses, but certainly if you create a legacy style notification and right at the very top say that it is an OPEN notification, then in the box as to who gets notified, you can actually carefully hand type the field name holding the email address. For example.
[my email recipient]
And in that same box, you can also list vertically in the other hard coded email addresses you want to receive.
so it will look like a vertical list in the box
[my email recipient]
If you need to send to an email in a field, best way I can think of would be if you can use Pipelines:
- In the "Notifications, subscriptions, & reminders", create a new Notification
- Set permission type to Open
- In Notify Whom, set to the email field
- In Notification when, set to when record is modified
- Create a formula that checks if it's 6 months before your date field, and if so, return true. Then you can have a Pipeline that either runs daily to check records where true and modify some other checkbox to trigger the notification.
If no Pipelines access, the next best thing is maybe in the "Notifications, subscriptions, & reminders", you can use the reminder to send to an email in a field. The reminder can be configured to be a certain number of days before the date field you have, say 180. But reminders can only be sent to registered users, so I think you would have to make a ghost user account possibly for an individual or group and control the emails there. Maybe the ghost user part can be automated with the API depending on how far you/someone wanted to go with this approach.
