Using Make for Scheduled Email Reminders When Email Is a Row Owner

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1

Hi Everyone,

I’m building a reminder app in Glide and using Make.com to send scheduled email reminders.

For security and privacy, the Email column in my reminders table is set as a Row Owner, so each user can only access their own reminder records.

The challenge is that I also need Make to read the reminder records, check the scheduled date/time, and send the email when the reminder is due.

Has anyone successfully built something similar while keeping Row Owners enabled?

I’m especially interested in knowing:

  • Can Make securely access rows protected by Row Owners?
  • Is there a recommended architecture for allowing Make to process reminders without removing Row Owner protection?
  • Is there another secure approach that avoids exposing users’ reminder information?

My goal is to keep each user’s data private while still allowing the automation to process scheduled email reminders.

If anyone has implemented this with Glide + Make + Row Owners, I’d really appreciate hearing how you structured it.

Thank you!

2

Row Owners are irrelevant here. When Make accesses data from your App, it does so using the Glide API, and Row Owners have no impact on what is available via the API.

Having said that, my advice is don’t use Make for this. Whilst it’s possible, it’s cumbersome and complicated to implement. Instead, use a Scheduled Glide Workflow. Way way simpler and easier to implement.

3

My app is a reminder app, so a user might schedule a reminder for a specific time, for example September 14 at 2:30 PM. In the Scheduled Workflow, when I compare the Reminder Date Time column, Glide only gives me options such as “is within today”. I don’t see an option to check whether the reminder time is within the next few minutes, has just been reached, or matches the current date and time.

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4

One thing to be aware of with server side workflows is that the current date/time is always based on UTC+0, so if you or your users are outside this timezone, you can get unexpected results when doing date/time comparisons.

For this reason, I’d advise creating the logic to determine if a reminder is due inside the data editor using one or more if-then-else columns that end up returning true if/when a reminder is due, then refer to that column inside the workflow.

A couple of things to consider:

  • How much granularity do you need? eg. do you allow users to set a reminder to a specific minute?
  • How soon after (or before) the reminder time is reached would you want the reminder to be sent?
  • Answers to the above two questions will determine how often your workflow should run. You should keep in mind that every time the workflow runs, that’s a minimum of 1 update. So if you decide to run it every 5 minutes (the maximum granularity) then thats at least 288 updates per day.
  • Is it just a single reminder, or could there be multiple? If multiple, then you’ll need to consider how to keep track of when reminders are sent, and how many have been sent.
  • I’d advise adding a “Reminder sent at” column to your table, and have your workflow populate that.
5

Thank you so much for the clarification. I found a workaround using Make, but I’ll consider restructuring the design to reduce or avoid multiple reminder runs, especially since the app will be free for certain users.