Unsubscribing from a Workflow Studio Email

Enterprise

One of the most powerful features of Workflow Studio is its ability to send emails at any point in a Workflow. This enables custom notifications & alerts so that your work in Gruntify can flow smoothly without the burdens of manual communications.

Up until recently, the ‘Send Email’ task only allowed you to add users in your Workspace as email recipients. This ensured that our Workflow automation system wasn’t abused to send spam or otherwise malicious emails at our expense. However, we heard from many customers over the years that this system also reduced the usefulness of the task, as it meant that it could not be used for automated communication with customers.

To rectify this pitfall, we have introduced a new email un-subscription system, that allows recipients to opt-out of receiving your emails completely independently. With this system in place, we have the confidence to lift our prior restriction and allow Workflow Studio emails to be sent to non-Gruntify users. Below we will describe how the system works so that both email recipients and Workflow owners can understand how to use it.

How to Unsubscribe from an Email

If you have received an email from Workflow Studio, you will see a blurb at the bottom of the body like so:

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To unsubscribe from these emails, you must:

1. Click the ‘unsubscribe here’ link in the blurb, which will take you to a page similar to below:

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2. In the ‘Your email address' field, enter your email address exactly as you see it in the ‘To’ field of the email you received; you will see the ‘Unsubscribe’ button light up once entered

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3. Click ‘Unsubscribe’ and wait for the message informing you that the unsubscribe action request has been sent successfully

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Congratulations! If you followed the above steps successfully, you should now be unsubscribed from the automated email.

For Workflow Owners: Handling an Un-subscription

If you are the owner (or most recent editor) of a Workflow that a user has unsubscribed from emails in, you will receive an email yourself as follows:

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There is a lot of information there, but here is what is most important to unpack:

1. Your Workflow is automatically disabled immediately after a successful unsubscribe action, to protect the recipient from receiving additional emails before they are removed as a recipient

2. In the email, you can see the details of the Workflow that was disabled, including the ID of the exact ‘Send Email’ task and Workflow Instance that the user received the original email in

   1. This will help you to narrow down where and why the email was sent to them, and act accordingly

3. To get the Workflow back up and running, you need to update it so that this recipient will no longer receive emails, and then re-publish it

As the Workflow will not process new instances while disabled, it is important that you act with haste to resolve this issue to avoid disruptions. Here’s what you should do:

1. Click the ‘Open Workflow’ button in the email to go straight to the Workflow that is affected

2. Find the ‘Send Email’ task that matches the ‘Activity ID’ included in the email notification

3. Open it, and check the ‘To Users’ field in the ‘Input Data’ tab

   1. If you can see the user’s email address in the list of recipients, simply click the ‘x' button next to their email, and click 'Save’ on the sidebar

   2. If the ‘To Users’ field is set to ‘Parameter’ or ‘Advanced Input’ mode (where you see an icon like below), this means that the recipient is automatically selected from data elsewhere in the Workflow - you will need to identify where it came from and change that input so that the user is not a recipient

      1. Parameter icon:

      2. Advanced input icon:

      3. To help identify where the recipient input came from, it may be helpful to view the Workflow Instance that sent the email:

         1. Identify the Workflow Instance ID from the email notification you received

         2. In the open Workflow, click the ‘Instances’ tab on the left-side toolbar

         3. Find the instance with that ID

         4. Click on the ‘Input’ and ‘Output’ buttons of tasks leading up to & including the email, to see how the data flows from one to another

4. Once you have made the necessary changes to the Workflow to exclude the user as a recipient, simply click “Publish Changes” on the right side of the top bar

5. Once you see the text “Published” with a green tick, that means your Workflow is back up and running

If you have any complications with rectifying your Workflow following the process above, please feel free to reach out to us via our support channels. Enterprise customers will have a private Jira portal to use, but if you are not an Enterprise customer, you can find our support links on our website.

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