Limit # of emails sent in XX minutes

Question

Hello, I would like to be able to limit the number of emails sent by a scheduled task in a specified time period. For example the scheduled task for password change reminder would never have more than 50 people, so I would like to have something that says if the task sends more than 50 emails within any 5 minute period stop/freeze the action and request approval to continue, or if approval is not possible stop the action and send an email to the system admin. I would assume this could be done with powershell and a counter. The reason I am asking for this, we had a scheduled task that had a coding error, an OR statement instead of an AND statement, and almost 2,000 people received a confusing email :oops: . I would like to have something that I can put on scheduled tasks to prevent this in the future.

Answer 1

Hello,

Currently this can't be done unless you send emails to all the users with the help of PowerShell. However, in this case you will have to put all the logic of the Scheduled Task in the PowerShell script, and also there can't be a global solution for all the Scheduled Tasks. You'll have to deal with each task one-by-one. This seems completely counter-productive.

Instead, we would suggest making some sort of a test run to make sure that a Scheduled Task works correctly. For example, if you are not sure about the conditions in your Scheduled Task, on the 1st run, instead of sending emails, you can modify a certain property of the AD objects that you don't use. It is a simple action that will not raise unnecessary attention and that you can easily undo. When completely satisfied with the test results, you can replace the action that modifies the property with the Send e-mail notification action.