Managing Email Lists with REFramework

General question.

How do you handle email lists for processes such as creating and distributing reports? Are you just listing all the email addresses under a variable in your config or is there a slick way to do this? Looking for ideas.

Thank you!

@Chris_Livesay

Putting all email lists in your config file will be challenge if we have to update email list in future. Once we build our solution in ReFramework, it’ll convert into nuget package and upload to Orchestrator. You won’t be able to update the email list as your config file will be in that nuget package.

To my experience, best approach is to store email list in another excel file and keep it at desired location. Add another workflow into your code under InitAllSettings which will read your excel file and store into List. Pass this list as arguments and send the email reports.

With this way, you’ll have access to modify your email entries easily.

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Thank you. I know that the Config is not a good option. You gave a really good idea.

@Chris_Livesay Welcome.

If its solve your query, please mark it as solution so that it may help others.Cheers!

Do you happen to have an example of doing something like this?

I should be clearer. I am trying to bcc a list of people on an email, not create individual emails.

@Chris_Livesay

In email activity, there is To,Bcc category available. You can pass your argument directly in Bcc property instead of To.

hi @Chris_Livesay,

How about Creating a Distribution List Say - AllBCCEmialsList - and use this as an asset to your Automation. In Future if DL Name Changes - Update the Asset in Orchestrator

Now from maintenance point of view - you just have to maintain the DL. Being the owner of the DL - You anytime can remove/add users to this DL.


Mukesh

are you saying to have a text asset and just a long string of the email addresses?

No , creating a distribution list of e-mails. So a distribution list a a collection of emails address , while sending emails we just specify the DL Name and the email is sent to all email addresses which are part of DL.

You can do a web search on creating a e-mail distribution list.


Mukesh

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Here’s what I ended up doing.

  1. Created Excel spreadsheet with TO, CC and BCC columns and placed in shared location
  2. Created an activitiy, “CompileEmailList”
  3. Read the spreadsheet and brake out strings of txtTOList, txtCCList and txtBCCList

This makes it very easy to insert the lists into an email. These are dynamic lists that are ever changing so having them in a spreadsheet on a share drive seemed like a simple solution for updating.

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The only Issue I see here is now we have a dependency on shared Location and Excel application. If shared drive is not accessible or taking time to respond , automation breaks - Also The shared excel if it is open by someeone by mistake / update the emails. Bot Breaks.

Suggestion : Keep the shared drive access restricted to few users.


Mukesh

Valid points! Right now the share is only available to a very few and I have the location in the Config so if it needs to change it’s just a tweak to the REF config file. Thanks!

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