Hello Everybody.
Introduction
This article will discuss the functionality of the Email Step provided by Harness out of the box, This step is used as part of a Workflow or Pipeline to notify the details of the Deployment to a User or a Group of Users. Having said that there have been a few instances where customer’s have seen issues with the Emails not being Delivered correctly to the mentioned emails and today we will discuss the resolution for these scenarios and the pre-requisites of what is required by Harness to make this work.
Lets Get Started !
Setup
Pre-requisites:
As part of this example we will be using the Email step to send Notifications to a singular User Email Address & Distribution List (DL) which is a group of users to see the behaviours. Here we have a simple Workflow with just an Email Step which will be sending out the Notifications.
Step-1 : Notifications to Users and DL
To test the behaviour we are going to execute the workflow in 2 different instances. We will be starting by sending the Email to a single User Address.
In this case we are using a test email from outside of Harness to notify them of the Workflow.
You can see that although this is a valid User email address, Harness did not send the Email across due to the email being an unregistered address.
Now, if we check the behaviour in the case where we use a DL as an example we can see that it is also failing to send out the email due to the DL being an unregistered address.
Both email addresses used in this example are valid and work as expected externally but seem to fail due to being unregistered in Harness.
Step-2: Finding the Cause
The reason for these Emails failing to be delivered for the mentioned addressess is due to Harness not being able to find them as a Registered Address. This is because these Emails Addressess are not part of the Harness account and have not been Registered with it in order to be used.
To fix this, we will need to invite these Emails Addresses as users to the Account in order for Harness to verify them as registered. This can be done by following the process listed out in the Document below and would be the same for DLs as well : Managing Users and Groups (RBAC) - Harness.io Docs
Once the invites have been accepted Harness can now verify them as Registered users of the Account.
Step-3: Sending the Notifications to Registered Harness Addresses
When we run the deployment now using the same Email Ids and Email Step we can see that it is able to successfully send the emails out.
Here we can see that Harness is now able to Deliver the Emails to the DL as well once it is a Registered user as part of Harness.
The same holds good for User Email addresses as well :
Conclusion:
In order to make the Email Step functionality work for Email Addresses outside of Harness, it is currently a requirement to have them be a Registered Address in the Account. This was a design decision to prevent people from using Harness’s email system to send email SPAM to any addresses and ensure Security as well.
Thank you for Reading.