Hello @suzanne.blinn, currently there is no way to prevent this. We have requested a feature enhancement on this so hopefully it will change. But at the moment I have just made it part of my normal workflow when creating a sandbox to disable all email notifications, and deactivate any workflow automators that we have for email notifications (which are a lot lol). 

I don’t see them removing the ability to email out of the sandbox completely as its the goal of the sandbox to represent the production environment as closely as possible. But would be nice is the ability to toggle this functionality on and off.

Sorry I don’t have better news.

Take care,

Zach

Hello @zachary.king thanks for confirming.  It’s unfortunate the feature is not available but hopefully it will be added.  As you mention it would be nice to at least be able to toggle it on & off.  That’s the functionality I’ve had in the past and it’s a much better experience.  You can fully test your workflow without any email actually being sent and just turn it on for the final test to ensure you’ve entered the email address correctly before syncing to prod.

For now I will proceed as you’ve recommended by removing those portions of the workflow until I actually want an email triggered.

Have a good day,
Suzanne

To overcome this limitation in our environment, we setup a rule on our email server, so  emails coming from the sandbox domain were directed to a single inbox, then gave our Fresh admins delegate access to that mailbox. 

I stumbled upon this post. In the meantime, is there a solution to this(or in development)?

I have the same problem of workflow automatons sending out mails to users.

A sandbox environment is super but useless if it overloads the real users with mails. 
 

I'm also in search of a solution for this, as testing automations in the sandbox while still receiving sandbox emails can be problematic. It would be beneficial to have the option to disable all email notifications while working in the sandbox.

Dirty workaround if you use O365 I guess you could block all e-mails in Exchange online. 

This is actually how we are handling the issue now. Its not great but works for the most part.

What emails do I need to block?

We actually have implemented a solution for this for emails being sent from workflows. We send pretty much all of our emails from workflows, so this works for us.

For every "Send email” node, we put a condition before it, like so:

The condition is a custom expression: {{service_desk_url}} =='your production url here'

This way, when the workflows are copied to sandbox when you generate it, in the sandbox this condition will be false, and the email won't be sent.

It's not the prettiest solution, but hopefully it helps :)