Send email

The Send email action drops a one-shot message into the inboxes of a chosen audience whenever a state runs its Actions list. Use it to tell an author their draft has landed in review, nudge a stakeholder that something has been published, or copy a fixed mailing list on every entry into a compliance state.

Add it from a state’s Actions section in the Workflow Builder: click Add action, pick Send e-mail, and fill in the form. The action runs in the late phase of the two-tier execution model, in parallel with the other late-phase actions on the same state. There is no guaranteed order between two Send email actions on the same state, and a failure in one does not stop the others. Each transition into the state fires the action once; entering the same state twice in a row sends the email twice.

Fields

Subject is the email subject line and is required. Message is the body and is required. Both are plain text — there is no placeholder syntax, so a literal @page_owner in either field arrives in the inbox as the seven characters you typed. The body is wrapped automatically with the page title, a link, and a View page button by the email template, so don’t repeat that scaffolding yourself. Newlines become line breaks; Markdown and HTML are not interpreted, and attachments are never included.

Users is the recipient picker. It accepts Confluence users, groups, workflow variables of type “users”, and free-form email addresses typed in directly. Three role checkboxes sit underneath: Include author, Include owner, and Include last editor. The recipient model — how each role resolves, how variables are read at send time, how deactivated users and missing email addresses are dropped silently — is the same as every other email Aura sends and is covered on the Email notifications page. The pending-reviewer role available on approval emails is not offered here: Send email is not tied to an approval.

The Users field carries a tooltip noting that up to 100 users will be notified. The cap applies to recipients resolved through groups and variables: when a group expands past 100 members, the first 100 receive the email and the rest are skipped. Users picked individually and free-form email addresses don’t count against the cap.

Bypasses digest mode

Send email is the one email type that ignores the global Bundle notification emails switch. It always delivers immediately, even when bundling is on for the rest of the instance. Treat each configured Send email as a deliberate per-transition message rather than something that will be quietly folded into a digest.

Timing and failures

The action fires the moment the transition completes — there is no delay setting and no schedule. Recipients picked by variable resolve at that same moment against the values stored on the page’s workflow instance, so updating a variable changes who the next firing reaches but does nothing for sends that have already gone out. Group memberships also resolve at send time.

If the action ends up with no resolvable recipients — every role contributed nobody, every user was deactivated, every variable was empty — it records a success and no message is sent. A genuine failure shows up in the page’s workflow history under the Workflow actions entry alongside the other late-phase results. The transition itself completes regardless; failed emails do not roll the page back.

For messages tied to a reviewer approving or rejecting, configure the email on the approval transition directly rather than on a destination state. For freshness reminders, use the expiration emails on the state with the timer. Send email is what’s left: a freestanding announcement triggered by a transition into a particular state.