Flow Designer Error: Email validation failed: Email contained the following invalid recipient addresses

[Community Alums]

Hi All

To get my head across Flow Designer I'm in the process of trying to copy our current workflow for change across to it. 

I'm testing my flow and found I'm getting an error in an email action:

"Email validation failed: Email contained the following invalid recipient addresses"

I've realized I haven't entered the email address' in correctly using the data pill, I've simply selected the field:

On the Change form we ask users to input 3x approvers; Business Signoff, System Signoff & Resource Signoff. They can have multiple approvers in each option if required. As they aren't inputted as reference fields I can't dot walk to the email address' for each one. 

Am I correct in assuming as I've just entered the fields in the 'To' section on the email it's failing? If i need to drill down to the email addresses on the flow, how do I go about that when they're not reference fields?

Change form: 

Current Flow Design Email Action:

Hopefully this is an easy question for those more experienced than I.

Thanks in advance. 

[Chuck Tomasi · Accepted solution]

I'm kind of surprised this lets you drop those pills there because they are different data types. The To field is expecting either an email address or user record. You've dropped in the contents from a list field (evident by the icons next to your fields on forms.)

The important thing to remember about list fields is that they are a comma separated series of sys_ids. The system doesn't know email addresses from that input (even if they are pointing to sys_user).

Reference fields, on the other hand also contain a sys_id, but it's only a single value. Email is particularly special when it comes to recognizing the sys_user table.

So you need to decide - do you change your form from list fields to reference fields, OR if you MUST have multiple values in each field, do you want to write a custom action to process those and return the email addresses you can then drop in to the To field of the notification?

[Community Alums]

Hi Chuck, thanks for the quick reply

The designer lets you drop any pill in the 'To' field, maybe a future enhancement would not allow this?

Where i work the changes classified as Major go to CAB, where the business and other relevant approvals are secured. Our minor changes however do not get tabled there. As such we do allow multiple users in each field as the change may require it. 

I found a workaround. Used the lookup feature to view the sysapproval table. Then used the records it found to populate the email:

[Chuck Tomasi]

Love it! Thanks for posting your solution!