SharePoint Designer 2013 can't send e-mail to some users

Question

I created a SharePoint 2013 workflow that is tasked to send e-mails to users. My problem is that the workflow can't seem to see some users' e-mail address.

For example, if I send an e-mail with one recipient in the To section and one in the Cc section, sometimes the To section is blank. We created a class to check if the e-mail is indeed blank but it is not.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

The reason why it was blank was because it's getting the Windows Authentication/NTLM format of the login name (e.g. domain\username), while the user in SharePoint is stored in Claims format (e.g. i:0#.w|domain\username).

Once we supplied the correct username format, everything worked as expected.

A little information regarding the setup we have:

1. We are using claims-based authentication. 1 web app, 1 SharePoint 2013 which has been migrated from SharePoint 2007.
2. When we first tried getting the user's information, it was taken from the AD which returned NTLM users.
3. Since the users in our SharePoint are in Claims-based format, the application couldn't find the user.
4. Instead of getting the user's information from the AD, we took it directly from the web app which returned the desired format.

Answer 2

Have you checked if the email settings for those particular User is set appropriately or not in the use profile setting or else where. ?

Check the settings for the user to whom e-mail is being sent and compare it with of those to whom it is not being sent.

Also check if you are returning the value as "Email Address" in the workflow.

I had the same problem in my solution, I got it solved by checking the e-mail address settings for those particular users.