About sending emails
Adding email alerts to your Knack apps is a great way to automate your workflow and also keeping your users up-to-date.
There are typically two different types of emails you may want to send to your users: group emails and transactional emails.
Group Emails
Group emails are what you typically think of with newsletters and email blasts. Users have subscribed to your list or signed up for a service and have granted you permission to send them emails.
Knack is not designed for handling group or bulk emails. To send group emails well you will need unsubscribe links, spam prevention, delivery maximization, and other features in place to ensure proper delivery.
If you wish to send bulk or group emails to your Knack users it’s recommended you use a 3rd-party service like MailChimp. You can follow this guide for setting up an integration between Mailchimp & Knack: Third-Party Integrations - Mailchimp
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are used to send one-time emails to a limited number of recipients. Transactional emails are typically triggered by a specific action in your app or database. For example:
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A receipt is emailed when an order is submitted.
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An employee is emailed when a job has been assigned to them by a manager.
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A manager is emailed when a project has exceeded a due date
Knack has two features for sending transactional emails like this:
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Form Email Rules - add rules to a form to send custom email alerts based on criteria you define
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Scheduled Tasks - schedule emails to be sent daily, weekly, or monthly. A scheduled email task will send one custom email per record matching your criteria.
Forms
To send an email when a form submits, you’ll need to access the form’s email rules. Start in your page builder and select the page the form is on from the menu in the left column. Then click directly on the form view:
You will find the Emails tab on the left-hand side:
There are 2 possible actions:
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Send a basic email notification - has no customization possible, it simply sends the form contents to a specified email address.
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Send a custom email (shown in image above) - lets you control the recipients, subject, and message contents.
By default, the email will send every time you submit a form. You can add conditions to specify when you want the email sent. i.e when the order is shipped:
Recipient Options
Custom Email Addresses - Send an email to a specific email address or to multiple addresses separated by a comma ( , )
A Single User Email field - Send an email to an email field
A Group of Users’ Email field - Send an email to all connected email records
Sender’s Email
The “From” address for your email. Replies to the email will be delivered to this address.
Subject
Customize your subject by adding object fields
Message Template
Customize your email template. Click on a field on the left to add it to your message template.
Action Links
Action Links are a special type of link that you can add to details, tables, lists, maps or calendar views. Action Links allow a Live App user to trigger specific actions behind the scenes with the click of a link on the view. These links can be used to update a record, update a connected record, insert a connected record or send a custom email.
Action Links can be found in any of the specified views, under the "Links" (or "Special" tab if you are using a details view) when editing the view.
To send an email using an Action link, select the 'Send a Custom Email' option for your action, then edit your email. You can use record values for custom recipients, subjects, and messages:
Click here for more information on using Action Links in your app.
Scheduled Tasks
A Scheduled Task allows you to configure an email to be sent daily / weekly / monthly. The task will email all of your Object records based on the conditions you set.
Scheduled Tasks are managed in your Database (Data tab in the builder). First click on the Object from the left menu that contains the data you want to email about, then the “Tasks” link above the object fields:
Click “Add Task” and Schedule your Task:
Select “Send a custom email” as the task action, add criteria for sending, and choose your recipients:
Essentially, follow the same steps outlined in the Email Rules section above.