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Missing Automations on Emails

When an email arrives in Glacis, any matching automations run automatically. If you're seeing new emails come in on a thread but no automations fire, this page explains what's happening and how to fix it.

This page only applies to automations triggered by incoming emails. Other trigger types (manual, scheduled, etc.) are not affected by this issue.

What you're seeing

  • New emails arrive on a thread as expected.

  • You can see older automations in the email sidebar, but nothing for recent messages.

  • One of the older automations may show a failed status.

Why this happens

Glacis processes email-triggered automations for the same thread one at a time, in order. This keeps things reliable — if two emails arrive seconds apart on the same thread, the first one finishes processing before the second one starts.

If an earlier automation fails, it holds up everything behind it. Newer emails still arrive, but their automations wait in a queue until the problem is cleared.

In short: A failed automation on an older email can block automations for all newer emails in the same thread.

How to fix it

If you don't have admin access

Reach out to your Glacis administrator with:

  1. A link to the affected email thread (or the subject line).

  2. Roughly when you noticed automations stopped.

  3. How many new emails have arrived since.

Your admin can diagnose and unblock the queue — usually within a few clicks.

If you're an administrator

You have two tools to resolve this: Automation Trace and Skip.

Open the Automation Trace

  1. Open the affected email thread.

  2. In the right sidebar, look for Show Automation Trace near the bottom.

  3. Click it to open a timeline of every incoming email on this thread and what automations ran for each.

The trace shows you:

  • Each email arrival and whether its automations completed, failed, are still waiting, or were skipped.

  • Which email is blocking the queue — look for the one marked Failed with a Lock badge.

  • What went wrong — expand the failed entry to see which automation hit an error.

Skip the stuck automation

Once you've found the stuck entry:

  1. Click Skip next to the failed automation task.

  2. Enter a brief note explaining why you're skipping it (e.g., "Issue resolved manually" or "Non-critical, safe to proceed").

  3. Click Skip task to confirm.

Glacis will immediately:

  1. Mark the stuck task as resolved.

  2. Release the queue.

  3. Run all the waiting automations — in order, for every email that arrived while things were blocked.

You'll see the trace update as each waiting email gets processed.

Skip does not re-run the failed automation. If that automation was supposed to create something (like a task or a record), you may need to handle that manually. Skip only unblocks everything that came after.

What if the next automation also fails?

The queue will pause again at the new failure. Repeat the same process — open the trace, check what failed, and skip to unblock. If automations keep failing, there may be an underlying issue with the workflow configuration. Contact the Glacis team so we can take a closer look.

Who can see these tools?

Show Automation Trace and Skip are only available to users with administrator permissions. If you don't see the link in the sidebar, ask your admin for help.

Need help?

If you have questions or run into issues, we're here to help: