Working with Email

Over the years, many business processes have been developed that use email as a storage, tracking, or processing mechanism. These processes have relied upon a combination of manual activities, third-party plugins, Component Object Model (COM) add-ins, and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting. As each version of email software changes, the technology and methods have had to change.

Instead of using discrete or custom code modules, Power Automate uses open REST-based APIs to interact with data for web services. As you learned in Chapter 1, Introducing Microsoft Power Automate, connectors are used to attach to data sources and endpoints (either to receive, retrieve, store, or send data).

Connectors are structured configuration files (typically formatted as JavaScript Object Notation or JSON) that define how Power Automate will interact with another service for automation tasks.

So what makes Power Automate different from previous automation technologies...

Learning about email connectors and actions

One of the most common scenarios for end user automation is email. Microsoft Power Automate can connect natively to different types of email systems, such as Office 365, Outlook.com, and Gmail.

Additionally, there are third-party plugins such as Mailparser that further enhance the ability of Microsoft Power Automate to process messages.

When processing a mailbox, there are several types of actions available, depending on the data source. Popular actions include the following:

• Creating or deleting a calendar event
• Creating or deleting a contact
• Flagging an email (such as the Importance flag)
• Forwarding and replying to an email or sending a new one
• Marking an email as read
• Downloading an attachment

As you saw in the previous chapter, you are able to access dynamic content – properties, metadata, and content related to a unique item. When manipulating mailbox content, you have...

Working with email

The challenge of automating email has been around almost as long as email itself. As we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, many solutions have been developed to address this over the years using technologies such as VBA scripting, Outlook rules, and COM add-ins. These solutions have required a mix of programming skills to develop and a dependence on a desktop computer always running to be able to execute the commands.

With Power Automate and Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, or Gmail services, the necessary components are always on, so you don’t need to worry about power outages, software updates, or network connectivity issues disrupting a business process. In this section, we’re going to look at options for handling incoming emails, processing attachments, and sending messages.

Reading email

Many organizations use the receiving of an email (typically, mail sent to a shared mailbox) as an informal trigger to start a business process...

Summary

This chapter built on some of the foundational concepts in previous chapters and introduced several new concepts, such as connecting to mailboxes, saving attachments, and how the Apply to each function is automatically inserted to help iterate through multiple items in a step.

Using all of these tools together allowed you to build a simple flow that can process inbound messages and their attachments, and then respond to the sender that their message was received.

In the next chapter, we’ll build on the knowledge you gained about SharePoint actions and use Power Automate to copy files between storage locations.

Learn more on Discord

To join the Discord community for this book – where you can share feedback, ask questions to the author, and learn about new releases – follow the QR code below:

https://packt.link/lcncdserver