Email automation using Microsoft Flow?

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One of the barriers to effective email automation for me has always been the way our IT provider has my work email locked down (basically the only way to access it Outlook on a PC, the Office365 web view, or Mail on iOS). I do a bit of server side automation using Office365’s server side rules but it’s pretty limited.

The email episode got me wondering if the fact that we’re on Office365 means the option to use Microsoft Flow is available. As far as I can tell, it is.

Now I just have to figure out something to automate. :wink: Anyone in Automators land using Flow for email automations? What are you doing with it?

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I only want to get notified about one type of email, nothing else. I describe how Flow helped me accomplish that in this other post.

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I’ve not had chance to do much with Flow yet as we’re still migrating stuff from Google Apps to Office 365 at work (post acquisition rationalisation). But I also have notification flows for mails from senior management that notify me via the iOS app.

The app does list lots of examples for mail based flows though. it would be worth scanning through them to see if any spark some interest.

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I just made another flow that I intend to use with Hazel on my mac. People email me MS Word forms to request authorization to work overtime.

The flow looks for emails with “Overtime” in the subject, saves the attached word documents to a specific folder in my OneDrive for Business, then converts them to PDF. If the conversion is successful, the word files are deleted.

After this flow runs, Hazel opens the newly added PDF file in Preview and brings it to the front so I can quickly sign the form.

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I would love to hear more about the flow details. What are the steps you’ve used to achieve this?

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This flow uses the Outlook for Office 365 and OneDrive for Business connections. You can see the screenshot below. The only tricky thing was realizing that I needed to create a file after converting the Word file to PDF.

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Thanks for sharing! Does this create a new folder each time? Or are they saved to the same folder on OneDrive each time?

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If they’re using a standard setup, it should only create the folder if the folder doesn’t already exist. (E.g. if you delete the folder with Hazel whenever it doesn’t contain any documents, it will recreate it when it needs to, but if the folder is there it should add to it.)

I’ve seen that they support Gmail so will be diving into email automation with Flow soon!

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Rose is correct. The folder is only created if it does not already exist.

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