Solution: SharePoint Designer email action’s To: line has a valid email address, but is removed and doesn’t send when triggered

If you’ve created a workflow in SharePoint Designer and an email action appears to be configured correctly, but emails aren’t being sent to some individuals in the To: line, you may need to turn the email being used into a workflow variable and use that instead of direct addition to the To: line of the email step.

This often happens for group email inboxes or external recipients that aren’t just a “normal user.” If there is a mix of recipients, some may receive the message but the troublesome addresses don’t even appear in the To: line, as if they’re removed before sending.

Note: If you’re sending to external recipients specifically and this post doesn’t solve your problem, check out my other post for additional help: Sending emails via SharePoint Designer workflow to external recipients using Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. addresses

To “variablize” an email (this is using a SP 2010 platform workflow type):

1. Set a new workflow variable of type string to the email address(es) that aren’t receiving emails as expected.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

2. Now in your email settings, use the “Workflow Lookup for a User” option and select your new variable from “Workflow Variables and Parameters” data source.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

3. Publish the changes to your workflow and test.

One Reply to “Solution: SharePoint Designer email action’s To: line has a valid email address, but is removed and doesn’t send when triggered”

  1. What I found was that email addresses not associated with a member of your site are rejected by the email command in Workflow 2013. I am told there is also new site guest feature at the admin level that can be turned on.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.