Send email from an automation
An automation can send an email to any address — a colleague, a customer, someone who has never heard of Harmony. There is no mailbox to connect and no email setting to turn on — once your workspace has Studio, this comes with it.
What makes it unusual is that it delivers the message. The Companion's ordinary email tool writes a draft and leaves the sending to you; this one puts the message in somebody's inbox while nobody is watching.
What the recipient gets
The message arrives from Harmony Companion <companion@heyharmony.com>. That is Harmony's address, not yours, and it cannot be changed — there is no way to send as yourself or to set a reply-to address.
Harmony adds a separator and this notice to the end of every message:
Sent automatically by Harmony Companion. This address is not monitored, so please do not reply to it.
Take that literally: nobody reads replies sent to that address. If the recipient needs to write back, the address they should use has to be inside the message. Ask for it when you describe the automation — "...and end it with my email address so they can reply to me."
Messages are plain text. No formatting, no images, no attachments.
An automation sends without checking with you first, every time it runs — and unless you ask otherwise, it is active the moment it is saved. Ask for it as a draft, read the recipient and the wording, and switch it on only then.
Nothing to set up
The feature is called Companion Email, and Harmony installs and looks after it for every workspace. You will find it under Marketplace → Apps, already there, marked Managed by Harmony — there is no account to connect and nothing to configure.
That page is worth knowing about only so you can confirm the feature is present. Nothing on it needs doing, and nobody needs to go looking for a mailbox to connect.
Ask for one
You do not add the step yourself. Describe the automation to the Companion and say who the email should go to.
- Open the Companion.
- Say what should happen and who should receive the email, and ask for it as a draft — "When a meeting summary is ready, email the recap to priya@example.com. Create it as a draft so I can check it first."
- The Companion asks permission to save the automation. Select Approve.
- Open the link it gives you. Read the recipient and the wording on the email step, then switch it on from the ⋮ menu — see Switch on or off.
Asking for a draft matters more here than it does elsewhere in Studio. Approving saves the automation, and a saved automation is active unless you said otherwise — so an automation you meant to review could send a real email to a real person before you have read it once.
You never have to name the block. The Companion reaches for Companion Email whenever a step has to deliver a message. The one exception is naming a mailbox yourself — "send it from my Gmail" — which makes it use that connected account instead.
Useful things to say — add "as a draft" to any of them:
- "When a meeting summary is ready, email the recap to priya@example.com."
- "Every Friday at 16:00, email me a list of the customer calls I had this week."
- "After a customer call, email the action items to the account owner and cc me."
What it looks like
On the automation's Editor tab, the trigger sits above the step that sends the email. The step carries whatever name the Companion gave it — here, Email the recap to Priya.
The block underneath that step is called Companion Email: create Messages. That is the name to look for in the catalog on the right, under action, and the name to use if the Companion picked something else and you want to correct it — "use Companion Email for that step instead of my Gmail".
It only works in automations
Companion Email is deliberately not available in an ordinary conversation. However you phrase the request, the Companion in a chat will not send as Harmony.
That does not make it useless for email there. It can write a draft in your own mailbox, which opens in the Email Composer for you to read and send yourself; and if you have Gmail or Outlook connected, it can send through that account. The one thing chat cannot do is send from Harmony's own address.
This is not a permission you can grant to your Companion or to any other agent. The tool exists for unattended work, and chat is not unattended: you are sitting there, so you can send the message yourself.
Inside an automation the rule is different, and both kinds of step can send:
| Step | Can it send email? |
|---|---|
| Companion Email: create Messages | Yes — it is the block that does it |
| Run agent | Yes, when the work is handed to an agent inside an automation |
| The Companion, in a chat with you | Not as Harmony — but it can still use your connected mailbox |
Most tools an agent uses in an automation have to be granted to that agent first, and the run stops and waits until they are. See Permission needed.
Companion Email is the exception. Because it only exists for automations, an agent running inside one may use it without being granted anything — so an automation you describe as "work out who to tell, then email them" can do exactly that, unprompted.
Which is worth pausing on. When the agent chooses the recipients, there is no list for you to check before switching it on: you are trusting it to choose correctly on every run, for external addresses, with meeting content in the body. For anything you would not want sent to the wrong person, name the recipients yourself rather than describing them.
What can go in a message
| Field | What you can put in it |
|---|---|
| To, Cc, Bcc | Any address, inside or outside your company. At most 10 addresses across the three fields together |
| Subject | One line of text |
| Body | Plain text. No formatting, no images, no attachments |
| From, Reply-to | Fixed. Always Harmony Companion <companion@heyharmony.com> |
Describe all of this in words and the Companion fills it in. To read back what it settled on, select the step on the Editor tab: the panel on the right shows the block's name and every field it was given.
The panel is there to read, not to change. To change any of it, ask the Companion.
If you go past a limit — an eleventh recipient, say — the step fails rather than sending a trimmed-down message, and the run tells you so.
How often it can send
Each person can send 10 messages every 15 minutes. The count follows whoever owns the automation, across all of their automations together, not each one separately.
Go over it and the step fails with "Email sending limit reached" and the number of seconds to wait. Nothing is queued and nothing is sent late. Open the run, wait for the window to pass, and re-run it.
One message per meeting leaves plenty of room, though several automations that fire on the same event share the one budget and can add up between them.
An automation that works down a list, a message per row, will reach the limit. Up to ten recipients, ask the Companion to put them in one message instead. Past ten, the two limits meet — the recipient cap stops you combining them and the send budget stops you firing them off quickly — so a genuine mailing list wants a connected mailbox, not this.
Who can use it
Nothing here needs setting up for email specifically, but Studio itself has to be available to you first. Three things have to be true:
- Studio is switched on for your workspace — Harmony has rolled it out, and an admin has turned it on. See Turn it on.
- Your role includes
automationspermissions, which is what lets you open Studio at all. See Who can use it. - Your role includes
email:send:own, the permission for sending as Harmony.
The last of those has its own permission on purpose, separate from the workspace's other integrations, so that somebody can be allowed to send email without also being handed the CRM.
Of the built-in roles, Admin has it. Team Manager and User do not, and a workspace admin has to add it on the Roles page — see Roles and permissions.
If the Companion will not put an email step into your automation, check your role before anything else. Without email:send:own it can see the block but cannot use it on your behalf, so it either says it is unable to send email or builds the automation around something else.
Companion Email or your own mailbox?
If you have connected Gmail or Outlook, an automation can use that too. They are good at different things:
| Companion Email | Your connected mailbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it comes from | Harmony, from a fixed address | You, from your own address |
| Can the recipient reply? | No | Yes, straight back to you |
| Anything to set up? | No | Connect the account first |
| Is it in your Sent folder? | No | Yes |
| Best for | Notifications, reminders, recaps that need no answer | Anything that starts a conversation |
A good rule: if the message is telling someone something, Companion Email is simpler. If it is asking them something, send it from your own mailbox.
When something goes wrong
Open the automation's Execution tab and find the step. What it reports tells you where you stand:
- Completed — the message was handed over for delivery.
- "Email sending limit reached" — nothing was sent. Wait out the window and re-run.
- "Invalid email address" or "Too many recipients" — nothing was sent. Ask the Companion to fix the addresses, then re-run.
- "Email sending is temporarily unavailable" — nothing was sent, and it is a problem on Harmony's side rather than with your automation. Re-run it in a few minutes.
Re-running continues from the step that stopped, so anything after that point happens again, and a step that already succeeded is not repeated. See Re-run.
A Companion Email block is safe to try again. Harmony gives each send an identity built from the message itself, so re-running the same message within a day does not deliver a second copy. Change the wording or the recipients first and it counts as a new message — which it is.
A Run agent step has no such protection. If the agent sent an email and then the step failed after that, re-running the step runs the agent again and it may send a second copy. Open the run, select Open companion thread, and check whether it already sent before you retry.
If the message never arrives and the run says Completed, ask the recipient to check their spam folder. Mail from an address nobody has written to before sometimes lands there the first time.