Send E-mail to a SharePoint group in SharePoint Designer Workflow

When creating a workflow in SharePoint Designer, of course you can use the send e-mail activity to send e-mail notifications to people during the workflow.  The dialog box for the send e-mail activity allows you to choose the recipient of the e-mail. You can either choose individual addresses from the address book, use one of the columns on the workflow item, or choose one of the SharePoint groups associated with the site.

I wanted to use this latter option (mailing a SharePoint group) to notify people when an item in a list had been flagged for deletion.  So I set up a special  group on the site called “Deleted Item Notification”, for people who would get that e-mail.   In my workflow, I set the e-mail activity to send mail to the group  Deleted Item Notification.  I put myself into the  Deleted Item Notification group to test the workflow, flagged an item for deletion and fired off the workflow.  Then I waited for my notification e-mail to arrive.  I waited and waited and.. nothing happened.   I checked the workflow history and it had errored out trying to send the e-mail.

I changed the workflow to e-mail my account directly and it worked fine.  So the problem was sending mail to a group.  It took a while to find a solution to this – the clue was in this post.

I had to change the group settings for the Deleted Item Notification group to allow everyone to see the membership of the group.  I also had to grant that group read access onto the site that was hosting the workflow – I think it would also have worked if I just allowed it to read the list to which my workflow was attached.  After those changes, the workflow sent e-mail correctly.

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