Introduction
You may decide to send multiple emails with attachments to the Email connector within the same sync period. In this article, find out how Fivetran processes the attached files.
Recommendation
When the Email connector receives an email, it copies the attached files to an internal S3 bucket so that Fivetran can process the file during the next sync period. If you send multiple emails with the same file name before the next sync period, Fivetran only syncs the most recent version of that file.
To ensure that Fivetran properly processes all your attached files, we recommend that you adjust your Email connector’s sync frequency to match your email send rate. For example, if you send emails once every hour, you should set the sync frequency to once every hour (or faster).
If you send emails in rapid succession (multiple times in a span of minutes), we recommend that you confirm that each email is delivered before you send the next one. Otherwise, the emails might reach Fivetran in a different order than you intended. Here’s an example for an Email connector with an hourly sync frequency. Its last sync occurred at 10 a.m.. You send 2 files, A and B, to the connector.
- File A sent at 10:30 a.m., delivered at 10:35 a.m.
- File A (modified) sent at 10:31 a.m., delivered at 10:33 a.m.
- File B sent at 10:32 a.m., delivered at 10:36 a.m.
At 11:00 a.m., Fivetran syncs the most recent files that have been delivered to the connector. In this case, we only sync the original File A and File B. We ignore File A (modified) because it was delivered earlier than the original File A.
Considerations
If you are sending delta files as attachments, make sure that only one delta file is delivered per file name each sync period. If you send multiple emails with the same file name but different delta file values during the same sync period, we only sync the most recent file.