Version: ODOO 10
App: Applicants (hr.applicant)

Today over 1000 of our users received an empty e-mail, (probably) relating to an automated action. This was not supposed to happen. I can't figure out why the e-mails were sent (over 5000 failed to send - fortunately) so I'm detailing the case here in the hope of someone having an answer.

I set up the automated time-based action with this flow in mind:

1. Phase of applicant is changed to 'Not interesting'

2. Applicant receives an e-mail with the reason why he's in 'Not interesting'

The automated action is set up like this:

• Filtered on all applicants in the phase called 'Not interesting' (51 applicants)

• Trigger after change in phase: time delay 5 min (I chose this trigger instead of 'edit' because in our flow the applicant's data can be edited which would trigger a new email every time)

• The called server action is 'Send email'

The email template, linked to in the server action, contains the name of the applicant ${object.partner_id.name} and the name of the responsible to that applicant ${object.user_id.name}.

E-mail settings:

• From ${(object.user_id.email and '%s <%s>' % (object.user_id.name, object.user_id.email) or '')|safe}

• To (E-mails) ${object.partner_id.email}

In my test instance, it does exactly that: send the e-mail to the applicant when he's moved to the phase 'Not interesting' (5min. after change in phase).

In my production instance, as detailed above, something went wrong. I have noticed 2 major differences in the sent emails, comparing to what was expected to happen:

• ODOO sent the email to users outside of the filtered phase 'Not ok'. The filter was not taken into account

• The translations for the sent email were not loaded. This means that all users received an empty email since I only changed the translation for the template (keeping that in mind for new templates ..)

Any idea what went wrong here? And most importantly, how I avoid this in the future?