The Repeating Email Action.

Last week I receive a request via email for a URL action to automate a long and annoying workflow that the sender had to repeat every day. As it turned out, the workflow was a bit too complex, and required a level of automation that, unfortunately, is not currently possible using iOS. However, in the process of trying to find work arounds, I created a nifty new URL action which I think could prove quite useful for some people.

The action chains together a Due action, a Drafts action, and a Launch Center Pro action. It also, theoretically, only needs to be run once.

The action is launched via Drafts and uses the Due URL scheme to create a new reminder in Due, which is actually a Drafts action. Set the reminder to repeat every day, or whatever interval you need, and create it.

Now, at each interval you specified, Due will pop up with a reminder. Following the URL of the reminder will launch Drafts and run the "emailDaily" action. emailDaily, in turn, will launch Launch Center Pro, which creates a new email with the recipients, subject, and body pre-filled.

So how is this useful? Well lets say you have a file which you need to send to a few of your colleagues on a regular basis. You store the file in Dropbox, which means it always has the same "dropbox.com/example" URL address. You can customize the email action so it has whatever body you want, and also include the Dropbox URL address for your file. Now the subject, recipients, and the body of your email will always be the same, so you can predefined all of these areas so that the entire process is automated. You just hit send.

Direct Import Link for dueDaily

Direct Import Link for emailDaily

Important: once you import the emailDaily action, it will require some tweaking. You will have to edit the URL in Drafts' settings by changing "person1@example.com" and "person2@example.com" to your two recipients, and adding more addresses after a "," if necessary. You will also have to change "FILENAME" to the name of your file, or whatever subject you want your email to have. I added a parameter to insert the date after the subject you choose. You can remove that if you wish or change the format if you want. Finally, change "dropbox.com/example" to whatever the Dropbox URL is for your file. You can add any other text around that URL to be included in the body.

Thinking more about this, we could also create an action so that you can append text to your Dropbox file and then immediately send the email after that, if that's the type of file that you are sending around. If you wanted to do that, just create a Dropbox action to append to your file, and then create a Drafts action that runs that new Dropbox action and then chains back to run the emailDaily action.