Approval emails are not consistently sending

[KMac1980]

As many others, it seems to be that the approval emails from flows are not consistently sending. I have a fairly complex approval process and out of 100 approvals, 4 of them have failed to send to the approver, however, they will get a notification on their phone as well as show in the Approval Hub!

Has anyone found a solution for this? What is causing random emails to not be sent to an approver? I am 2 weeks from go-live and their "fear" is that the approvals are not reliable. I need some type of data or response to present to the business owners regarding this. 

[Pstork1]

Are you sending these 100 approvals out from multiple flows?  or in parallel in a single flow?  With that many emails being sent at one time I don't think you can depend on all of them going through simultaneously. With that many approvals I don't think you should design it to run in parallel.  Find a way to organize it into smaller groups.

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi @KMac1980 ,

Do you mean that the approvers can get a notification on their phone and the Approval center but not an email?

Do only the 4 approvers have the issue?

Please make sure the approval emails are not moved into other folders, such as a Junk folder.

I haven’t seen such an issue on my side.

Please share more details on it and I will try to involve more resources to look into this issue.

Best regards,

Mabel          

[KMac1980]

@Pstork1  I did a bulk of 10 at a time just to test. It would be extremely rare if we even have 2 at a time, however, it is still happening. I created a new item today, sent the item for approvals. The first approval step, i got the email fine, the second approval step which i was also the approver for, i did not get an email but i got a notification from Flow on my phone and it was in the approval hub online. 

[KMac1980]

@v-yamao-msft 

Yes, they are getting the notification on the phone, and in the Approval center, but not getting an email requesting them to approve an item. The Flow itself is not failing or even noting there are any issues. 

The approvals for each item will change and have been different in the times we have seen it. Yesterday through the tests I sent, i was the approver on all of them.

Approval emails are not going to Junk or Other or Quarantine. We have them whitelisted and marked as a safe sender. We ran a trace on my email and verified that they did not hit my email, junk, or quarantine. 

[Pstork1]

Are the approvals being sent by a single Flow or by multiple Flows running off the same trigger? This kind of problem is usually related to timing and capacity.

[KMac1980]

@Pstork1 

The Approvals run when the status is = to "Sent for Approvals" and the hidden status is not equal to the status. The first step updates the hidden status to equal the status to preven looping.  The Flow checks to see if the delegate field is blank or not. Then it takes the appropriate approval path ( If delegate is empty, then it only sends to the 1st approver, if it is not empty it will send it to the approver AND their delegate) . The Flows are running fine with the exception of the missing emails. There is only 1 flow running on item modification.

Regardless of limits or not, which 10 at a time should not interefere or even come close to limits or capacity. I get it if an email takes a little longer to send because it is sitting in a queue, but that is not the case. Approvers are randomly not getting emails. From what I can see, there are no patterns or even a slight reasoning of what would be the cause. If there were, it would make me feel slightly better to be able to tell our business owners so that we know what to look for. 

[Pstork1]

Sorry, maybe I'm not being clear enough.  How many Flows are using the same trigger in this particular list? I've seen Approval emails fail in the past when there are a large number of individual Flows being triggered at approximately the same time. I'm pretty sure the system is just using a simple SendMail that doesn't wait for an acknowlegement.  So if there is too much traffic at a given point in time then the emails fail and are not sent. As I said, I've seen this happen when one Flow sends a lot of emails or when a lot of Flows are triggered at the same time and send multiple emails.

How many Flows are you using with the same trigger on the same list?

[KMac1980]

Just 1 Flow on the list  @Pstork1 

[Pstork1]

And there is nothing consistent about the email domains that don't recieve the emails?  Since you said they can see the approvals in the Flow web I assume these are all internal users?

[KMac1980]

Correct, all emails are going to internall users and there is nothing consistent or even a slight pattern emerging. @Pstork1 

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi @KMac1980 ,

Could you try creating a new simple flow with an approval action to send an approval email to the 4 users who are not able to get the approval email?

The issue still cannot be reproduced.

Best regards,

Mabel

[KMac1980 · Accepted solution]

We found the issue! Since the IP ranges were not posted anywhere, we were actually geo-blocking some of the emails because they were getting sent from the Singapore data center! We whitelisted the ranges given and the issue is resolved. I have requested a list of any additional items that may be affected by IP ranges/geo-blocking that we are not aware of.

[KJG]

Hello,

How did you obtain a list of the IP addresses? Did you have to contact Microsoft to request them? I'm willing to bet my company has been having this same issue as well.

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Please, do you have any news regarding these IP addresses from Microsoft ? i'm having the same issue with my company (out of 70 approvals, only 40 were received).

Thank you in advance !