topic Re: Sending emails in Workato in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Sending emails in Workato

wotching — Fri, 07 May 2021 01:47:35 GMT

Open ended question - We are interested in building a way to send emails using Workato. We would prefer to avoid using Google Workspace / Gmail connection, due to security/compliance friction. And the "Email by Workato" doesn't fit our requirements since we'd like to send from an internal address

Has anyone successfully set up an SMTP server connection with Workato to send emails? What does that process look like? Or do you send emails using Workato using another way?

The use case we have in mind is to send a weekly Change digest to a group of people. The recipe would search our Jira tickets for upcoming Change Control tickets, and summarize the information in an email.

Appreciate any insight anyone can share. Thanks!

Re: Sending emails in Workato

justinmnorris — Fri, 07 May 2021 01:52:49 GMT

Hey Will Balson - we've done this with a client by fetching content from the external system(s) and pushing it to a Marketo email and scheduling it from there. You can create a separate list or partition for internal comms.

Re: Sending emails in Workato

gordonhuworkato — Fri, 07 May 2021 02:05:53 GMT

Seems “interesting” that gmail connector is not allowed but a third party mailing application impersonating an internal email is 😎

How about
(1) send the results to a Slack Channel in a human readable form
(2) in the slack message, attach one link to view all tickets (JQL) if the users like to see more details

Re: Sending emails in Workato

justinmnorris — Fri, 07 May 2021 02:08:27 GMT

Agree that sending to Slack is a great process and arguably preferable to an email as the history is visible in the channel.

Re: Sending emails in Workato

gordonhuworkato — Fri, 07 May 2021 02:11:12 GMT

Here is another approach. Build a slack command so that the users can check any upcoming change controls, approvals, etc ad-hoc in addition to the scheduled reports. (A billable recipe though…)

Re: Sending emails in Workato

bud — Fri, 07 May 2021 02:46:10 GMT

Have not done it but some vendors have rest APIs for sending email (sendgrid, mailchimp). Would that help? -- Bud

Re: Sending emails in Workato

wotching — Fri, 07 May 2021 08:53:31 GMT

Appreciate all the insight! We already have a daily slack digest which has been met with great feedback. We decided email would be more appropriate for the weekly digest, due to the audiences involved.

We plan to have the Jira ticket approvals go to team directors in slack, as well.

Thanks all, will look into whether we have an existing email vendor that would be
easy to tap into. If anyone has done a custom solution with SMTP, would love to hear about it

Re: Sending emails in Workato

gliddell — Fri, 07 May 2021 13:52:17 GMT

Can you expand on what the friction is with using GMail? I am interested to understand why GMail would be a point of friction for your compliance team but something like SendGrid would not. Thanks.

Re: Sending emails in Workato

wotching — Fri, 07 May 2021 14:03:15 GMT

Sendgrid would require a review just like connecting Gmail would. Entering into speculation territory, I imagine connecting a Gmail account may provide Read access to existing emails in the account that is connected, whereas sendgrid might not?

In any case, if we invest time in doing a review, it would probably be for Gmail. When connecting Gmail, it is best practice to be signed in as a service account right?

Re: Sending emails in Workato

gordonhuworkato — Fri, 07 May 2021 23:16:31 GMT

Or maybe … simply use workato’s built in Mail connector. Just that the mail will be sent to mailer@workato.com

Or use workato to send to a Gmail and then have mail flow rule to relay.

Friday crazy thoughts 😎

Re: Sending emails in Workato

mroldanvega — Tue, 11 May 2021 00:46:02 GMT

We created a service user in our Outlook/Office environment and use the Workato Outlook OOB connector. The Workato Connector is setup with this service user credentials and so it is an internal email. This works very well for us and we don't have to worry about limits or subscriptions plans.