If a User has no permission on site, Workflow throws null exception when trying to send Email

Question

I have run into this problem many times and not yet able to find solution to it.

Scenario:

1. A user John is present in AD but have no permissions on the site.
2. A user filling out InfoPath form selects John from People Picker Control.
3. Upon submit, a workflow runs that sends email to the user listed in the People Picker Control.
4. Since the user John has no permission on the site, workflow throws NULL exception and goes into suspended state.
5. This leave the workflow in a state where remaning statements don't run and some business rules not applied which is seriously not good.

Please suggest me some solution to this.

Answer 1

If you are getting this then you must verify that the user to whom you are sending email must have email enabled in Active Directory.

In order to cross verify that which user has email enabled you can run following command into the command prompt.

Dsquery * -filter "&(objectCategory=user)(!UserAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2)(mail=*)" -attr name samaccountname mail  > c:\temp\file.txt

This command will give the list of user who has email enabled and you can easily verify whether the user to whom you are sending email through workflow has the email enabled or not.

In case you found your user does not have email enabled then in that case you can refer this to enable email for your user in Active Directory.

Let me know your thoughts.