My Automation Emailed The Wrong Address.

 

You turned on something that sends email for you. It says sent, and you believe it, because there is a tick next to the word.

Mine said sent last week. The message went out from an address the client had never written to, so it landed outside the thread we were already in.

The client saw a stranger. My system saw silence. Then it chased them again.

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WHAT WORKS

Find the blanks nobody filled in.

Every automation you switch on has a list of questions it has to answer before it can act. Some of them you answered during setup. The rest it answers for you, quietly, out of your defaults, and it never mentions which ones those were.

Mine had two email accounts connected. Nothing ever asked me which one a reply should leave from, so it used the one I use most. The client had written to the other one.

Here is the part worth understanding. That is not a glitch. A glitch is occasional. A default applied to the wrong record is wrong every single time that record comes up, and it is confidently wrong, and it looks exactly like working.

Sent is a claim about your outbox. It is not a claim about the conversation.

The blanks are always the same handful. For anything that sends on your behalf:

- Which address it sends from, when you have more than one.

- Which name and signature ride on it.

- What time "9am" means when the recipient is in another country.

- Who it replies to when three people are on the thread.

- What it does when it is unsure. Skip, guess, or come and ask you.

For each of those, ask one question: does it read the answer off the thing it is acting on, or off your settings?

Off the thing it is acting on is correct. That client, that conversation, that invoice. Off your settings is a coin flip that lands the same way forever, and the day your work stops being uniform is the day it starts being wrong without telling you.

Then do the arithmetic, because it is worse than it sounds. Two connected accounts and one default is not a small error rate. Every conversation living on the second account is handled wrong, permanently, and none of it shows up as a failure. It shows up as clients who went quiet.

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Below is the receipt test I run now. Four things to look at in the recipient's mailbox, and a fifth check that catches what those four miss. (Go visit the link below to see)

Read the rest of this issue on our website: https://ankushchauhan.com/what-works/automation-emailed-wrong-address

The automation in this story is mine. It is called Alacrio, it runs my client follow-ups, and since this happened it shows me the account, the thread and the decision before anything leaves.