Email workflows

An Email workflow watches for a situation and, when it shows up, writes the email you'd have written. The draft lands in Drafts, linked to the email that triggered it, with that email's files already attached. You read it and send it. Nothing goes out on its own.

It's the shape for "every time X happens, I write the same email."

The sentence

"When a customer sends a design file for printing, draft the order to the print shop with their file attached."

Three parts, again:

• The trigger — the situation Dustav watches for. This is judgment, not a keyword: "a customer sends a file that has to reach a supplier" rather than "subject contains PDF".
• Who gets it — the print shop, in this case.
• The words — either fixed (a template) or written fresh each time from a short hint about what to say.

Dustav settles the trigger by reading a real example of the situation — the actual back-and-forth in your mail — and shows you the draft it would write before it creates the rule.

Who gets it: four honest answers

The recipient is the part people expect to be hard, and it isn't, because there are exactly four kinds of recipient and Dustav asks which one.

• The same party every time. The print shop, the supplier, your bookkeeper. The address is a fact; if Dustav doesn't know it, it asks rather than guessing, and the rule waits until it's filled.
• Whoever sent the triggering email. An acknowledgement back to the customer who wrote in. No address to store — it's read off each email as it fires.
• Someone found by reading. The supplier says the job's done, so the email goes to the customer from the original thread. Dustav describes how to find the right person in the rule, and the platform refuses any address that doesn't already exist in your real mail or contacts — it can locate a person, never invent one.
• The reply itself. No separate email at all: when the trigger shows up, the reply Dustav drafts on that thread follows your template word for word. This is how a standard acknowledgement gets sent on an inbound email — the rule says when, the template holds the words.

A per-email recipient is never a reason to say no. It's what the modes are for.

When the trigger is something you send

An Email workflow can also fire on your own sent mail: "when I send a new member their welcome email, draft a second email to them with the discount code." Dustav reads each message you send right after it goes out; when one matches, the follow-on email is drafted and waits in Drafts. On this side the recipient is one of three: the same party every time, whoever you sent it to (read off your own message), or someone found by reading. It starts with what you send from now on. For welcomes you've already sent, ask Dustav to draft those in chat, one at a time.

One honest note: if the email you're sending comes out of your own app or website, adding the extra words to that email directly is usually simpler than a second email you have to send by hand every time. Dustav will say so when it's the better answer.

The words

If you always send the same thing, save it as a template and point the rule at it: the draft follows the template verbatim, and editing the template later changes every future draft with no change to the workflow. If the wording varies with each email — a forward whose note depends on what the customer said — the rule carries a short hint instead, and Dustav writes the email fresh each time in your voice.

The triggering email's own files ride on the draft. A template's linked documents ride too. What a rule can't do is reach into your Documents for something the trigger didn't name; that's a template's job.

On the tab

An Email card shows when it fires (the first clause of the trigger; the whole thing on hover), to whom, and what it sends — the template it drafts from, the files that come with it. Open it and the detail has the full condition, the recipient rule, the template as a chip that opens the words, and Prepared so far: every draft this rule has produced, each opening the draft in Drafts or the receipt in Sent once it went. A rule in reply mode lists the replies it steered.

Pause it with Active; a paused rule prepares nothing until it's back on.

What it can't do

It can't send. It can't decide a recipient it didn't read. It can't fire on a date or a clock — that's a Schedule — or on silence after you send something — that's a Follow-up. It can't be backfilled over old mail (a backfill only fills tables). And it can't attach a document the template doesn't already carry. Every one of those is a fence, not a gap.