Magento – Order confirmation, add order comment, Order (send email), Send Order Email Copy To

Oh that is a tough one. From what I can see you have two options.

1. Create your own version of the sendNewOrderEmail function so that you do the same stuff and generate the email but just send it to a different address.
2. Work with the $copyTo = $this->_getEmails(self::XML_PATH_UPDATE_EMAIL_COPY_TO);, I know you already have your event and I am not 100% sure what you need but you could change this function,

It might not be ideal but if you rewrite the Mage_Sales_Model_Order you could then check in the _getEmails if your conditions meet then you send a copy to where ever you need to, otherwise you continue with the normal sales order. Even as I write this I am not convinced if this is such a good idea, but I cannot see another "easy" way to hock into this without duplicating a lot of code when generating the email.

One final not is that the event you have selected checkout_onepage_controller_success_action is specific to the onepage checkout so if you create an order via the admin or multiple shipping checkout then your code would not be hit, sadly this has caught me out before :(

In case any one else has this issue:

In our case, the shipment was being created via the API from a third-party. With the Magento API, there's a flag whether or not to send the email on the createShipment call - this flag must be set by the third-party API. However, when done that way, the email doesn't contain the tracking information.

There are two possible solutions to this:

1) Override the Mage_Sales_Model_Order_Shipment_Api file, comment out the sendEmail line in the create function (in Magento 1.7, line 162), then add a line in the addTrack function $shipment->sendEmail(true, ''); after the $track->save() call (in Magento 1.7, line 205). Note this only works if there's only one tracking number per shipment. Also note that this hard-codes to send the email, since the flag doesn't exist on the addTrack call.

2) Instead of relying on the New Shipment email, add an API call. After adding the shipment and tracking number, then add a comment with the sendEmail flag set - then enable and update the New Shipment Comment email template to contain the contents of the New Shipment template.

Hope this makes sense, and hope it helps anyone else who follows.