Email Creation Automation (Outlook)

I need to create an automation to create emails in Outlook that I repeat daily/weekly. I want the automation to fill in recipient, subject and body. I’m assuming some combination of Applescript/TextExpander/Raycast will get me there.

Just curious if others are automating email creation and how/what tools are they using? Thanks!

If your Microsoft 365 license includes it, I would strongly suggest Power Automate. It has a lot of flexibility to integrate easily with Outlook.

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I totally agree with @Tdawg_07. If you have access to Power Automate, you can do it all in the cloud using Microsoft’s fully integrated automation platform. It has to be by far the best option.

But, if you can’t utilise Power Automate, and Outlook is your default mail app, a standard mailto link gives you lots of opportunities for popping things up ready to send and is easy to implement.

mailto:someone@example.com?subject=This%20is%20the%20subject&cc=someone_else@example.com&body=This%20is%20the%20body

The above as an actual clickable link

Alternatively, Microsoft Outlook is indeed AppleScript-enabled if you really want to be able to have the app do everything for you without intervention.

I have automated e-mails in the past, such as having my Gmail account e-mail into Evernote daily to create a journal note for that day. I’ve used IFTTT to trigger e-mails for various notifications. I’ve used command line tools to e-mail logs and backup summaries. As much as possible, I think cloud or always on servers make the best options for mail generation, but the purpose for me has had to be right.

These days I tend to default to other options like mobile device notifications. I actively try to steer as much as possible away from e-mail as there is too much e-mail in my life. As a result all my e-mail automation (pretty much just all mail rules at this point) are all about the triaging and never the creation. It has proabably been 5-6 years at least since I was using automated e-mail creation rather than direct notification.

I’m looking for a similar solution. I have a bunch of Automator actions that generate templated Outlook emails that I’ve been trying convert to a Shortcuts-based solution - so that I can use across all of my apple devices. I thought I had a solution combining Datajar and Shortcuts but the Outlook Send Message action doesn’t seem to function.