Let me preface this by saying that I love the new true automations in Shortcuts in iOS14. However, I wonder if they somewhat miss the mark in how they can be really useful. The “when I receive an email” one started my brain working - often I have a report run from a system and sent to my email as an attached file. I then have a Microsoft Flow/Power Automate (available through my Windows focused work platform) grab the file and save it for me and then create a task to do what I need with the report. I have 10 of these run monthly for various tasks. I thought shortcuts could be used to do some of this work on my iPad, but I can’t replicate for one reason - Shortcuts trigger of an email coming in has no way that I’ve found to pass that triggering email as an input to a shortcut. Maybe I’m missing something or it’s more of a failure or the Mail.app actions in Shortcuts rather than Shortcuts’ failure, but it seems this would be a really useful way to do automation similar to ever other platform I’ve tried.
I’m not running the beta just yet, but according to iMore:
Email: Triggers an automation when you get an email meeting particular conditions like sender, subject, or what account it was sent to.
That sounds like it is exactly what you have. A trigger, not a share or trigger plus reference. But, I don’t think any triggers pass in content. They are all just match criteria on system events / states. I suspect what would be more aligned than passing the mail in would be an action to query an email account. That would then also build in the structures for email attributes/properties and allow it’s use outside of triggers.
But, assuming you haven’t already, this is exactly what the feedback mechanism for the betas supports. The more people who highlight how much better this would be with email access, the more chance there is of Apple moving it up on their roadmap.
