Approval email suddenly not sending...

[JonRowlands]

Hi there,

I am in the final stages of testing a flow to grant extensions to students in my university. The system has been working fine in testing, but has now stopped sending the approval email. The only thing I have changed is the 'assigned to' value in the approval. I have tried adding in a colleague, and they did receive the approval email, but for some reason, it will not send to me or the generic mailbox I have created to handle these approvals. 

Approvals are still accessible via the other routes, but just the handy approval email has stopped.

I have notifications set to 'yes' and have tried all the steps I could find in similar problems raised in the forum. I have also explored the issue with my ICT department, who report that no approvals have been blocked or quarantined by the university system, so it has to be something in the flow, but I can't see what (as I've only changed the one thing). When I change it back to how it was, it still doesn't work.

Any suggestions would be very gratefully received!

All the best,

Jon

[Pstork1]

Approval emails can only be sent to user's who are in the Tenant's Azure AD and have approval access in Dataverse.  When you say a generic mailbox is this a test user, a shared mailbox or just a mailbox?  In the assigned to field when you type in an email address it will show you possible user's that match.  If the email isn't in that list then they can't receive or act on approvals.  See screenshot below

[JonRowlands]

Thank you for the speedy reply Paul! 

Both the mailbox and my email address auto-populate the username like your screengrab above, but initially when I first started investigating, I noticed it had reverted to the full email address, rather than the grey boxed version. So I cleared and replaced it with another address, saved, then reset it back to see if that cleared the fault, but no luck.

It is so strange because the approval has also stopped coming to my own inbox, which was working fine, and now it won't send to either mine or this new shared mailbox address. But it will share to a different colleague entirely.

[Pstork1]

I suspect for that you'll need to open a support request.  You could try removing and re-adding the approval action itself to see if that helps.  I suspect something in the internal configuration is corrupt.

[JonRowlands]

Thanks Paul,

I've saved dozens of different builds over the last month, so I'll try that and see if it clears it.

Thank you!

[JonRowlands]

Sadly this didn't work, so I'll submit a ticket and see what happens. 

Many thanks again Paul; your advice is very much appreciated!

All the best,

Jon

[JonRowlands]

PS Newbie question, but how do I submit a ticket? Is it through the 'I Found a Bug' forum?

Thanks!

[Pstork1]

Check this article.

Get Help + Support - Power Platform | Microsoft Docs

[JonRowlands]

Thanks Paul!

[JonRowlands]

Solved - ish...

Hi all,

I just thought it might be useful to flag that I think I have resolved this via trial and error. It's not a very satisfying solve really, but it's ok and works. The problem seems to be having a mailbox address in the 'Requestor' box of the approval. What happens is the approval is started and features in the list of approvals via Power Automate, but no email is sent for some reason because it doesn't like the mailbox address. It's a little annoying as it also won't send the approval to the mailbox either (when entered in the 'Assigned to' box), but it does send it to the other addresses, so I can work with that, even though it's not ideal. It's weird because Flow doesn't know that it's a shared mailbox and not a specific email address, but I can work around it and keep the workflow I'd wanted. 

So a resolution of sorts, that will do for now!

Thanks again for all the help, very much appreciated.

All the best,

Jon

[Pstork1]

Just to clarify.  I didn't know you were trying to send to a shared mailbox.  By definition that won't work because the requestor and the assigned to has to be an individual user.  So neither can be a shared mailbox or a distribution list.  You are actually assigning the approval to the User Principal name of the user (as represented by the mailbox) that's why the shared mailbox won't work.

[JonRowlands]

Thanks Paul.

Just to check, you can still have multiple approvers then, providing they are principal name users and delineated by a semi-colon. Ideally, I wanted the flow to pull approver data from a spreadsheet (easier to keep updated than venturing deep into the flow), but I think this might further complicate things.

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

Yes you can have multiple approvers.  You enter them with a semi-colon list of email addresses.  The users must be users in the tenant and they have to be individual users.  You can't use DLs, Shared mailboxes, or External emails.

[JonRowlands]

Thanks Paul!