Start and Wait for Approval Flow Sending Duplicate Email Notifications for Pending Approval Requests

[SAHoff]

I have a workflow that triggers on a selected SharePoint list item and allows users to start an approval request for the item's attachments, while also copying information about that approval request into a second SharePoint approvals history list. The problem is that the approver receives the initial email notification as expected, followed by two additional, unwanted, identical email notifications every day that the approval is left pending, until he responds to the request. These emails are identical to the initial email, with the action buttons to select an approval response, and they show up around the same times every day, once at 11:30am and once at 4:45pm. He is only receiving the expected initial notification in Teams, and the flow is not triggering multiple times, so I can't see anything abnormal happening on the back end. Has anyone experienced these repeated email notifications and figure out how to stop them? The Start and Wait for Approval action is not inside an Apply to Each and I changed the Retry Policy to none, but that didn't help. There are multiple approvers, but the approval type is set to Custom Responses--Wait for one response, so it shouldn't have to do with that.

The rest of the flow is below, but the duplicate emails occur while the flow is running and the approval is pending, before it ever gets to the below portion with the responses, so I doubt the rest of this is relevant.

[jmcclena]

I am experiencing the same exact behavior with the same type of approval flow.  We entered a ticket with Microsoft as we didn't' change anything with the flow and it has been used for over two years.

[SAHoff]

Thanks. Thought I was losing my mind, since I can't find a lot of other reports of this. Hope they're able to resolve it. The repeated emails are driving everyone nuts over here.

[braydenlarson · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I wanted to post this message here to let you know that there is currently a known issue with Approvals causing duplicate emails that our developers are working on getting a fix rolled out for. There is a Service Health Dashboard number you can use to follow for updates on this moving forward

MC452011

The current ETA on a fix being released is tentatively set for the beginning of December.

have a good day,

[gnarlygeek]

I have a similar flow that prompts for multiple users, then performs "Start and wait for an approval". The next step is an Apply to each based on Responses. That step contains an update of the source list item, and the creation of a custom workflow list item. Our problem is that if 4 users are entered when initiating this manually triggered workflow, then each of them will receive 4 Teams notifications and 4 emails. I resolved this by setting the concurrency flag in the Apply to Each, but now I can't recover the responses to update my lists because the size of the Responses text field exceeds the 255 character limit according to the PA error. I feel there should be some way to address each of the Response elements separately. It's not clear if it's an array of strings? If i remove the concurrency flag from Apply to Each, then I get the multiple entries in the workflow history - one for each responder. Sorry for the length. Would this scenario be resolved in the solution that's currently under development?

[BChristianson]

Has this issue been fixed, looking for a solution as a similar notification issue is currently happening as of Dec 6/22. 

[gnarlygeek]

It's currently working in our scenario as of last Wednesday. We are in a GCC, government tenant, which is usually the last tenant type to get this kind of fix.

[SAHoff]

Ours seems to have been fixed as of last week as well.

[tylerbailey1]

Does anyone have an update regarding this issue with approvals? Service Health Dashboard 

MC452011

[SAHoff]

This issue was resolved for us in early December when the fix was rolled out.

[pennyland]

Hi there,

I'm not sure if this could be tenant specific, but we are still seeing this issue.  Can someone please provide a link to the fix online showing that it has been completely rolled out so that I can hopefully respond to that track directly with MS?  Thanks so much Power Automate community.  We couldn't figure out why this was occurring!

[MAR17A]

Hi Pennyland (and Community),

Did you get a response to this, as I am currently experiencing the same issue?

Seems very frustrating that it could be tennant specific.

Cheers,

[pennyland]

Hello Mar17A - it just stopped happening. Nothing changed on our end. So whatever it was it must have been addressed.

[PeterBoard]

I am also experiencing this bug at my work, it started about two or three weeks ago. Might need to log a fresh job with Microsoft.

Edit: Actually, ours isn't a multiple email alert bug (Duplicate Email Notifications in the thread heading), but a Multiple MS Teams App notification bug - which is really this thread - Start and Wait for Approval - Multiple Teams Notif... - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com) 

[Shreeya_93]

This did not help! 

This is how my flow looks! 

Keeps on repeting the first approval multiple times and the flow has a second level of approval it does not trigger it as well. Please help!