Email Automation in Power Automate Desktop

Email is one of the most important communication tools in both personal and business environments. Automating email tasks such as sending reminders, generating reports, or processing incoming emails can save you a lot of time and effort. Power Automate Desktop (PAD) offers a straightforward way to automate email tasks directly from your desktop.

In this blog post, we'll explore how to automate email tasks in Power Automate Desktop. We’ll cover:

• Sending emails.
• Reading emails.
• Organizing emails (e.g., moving or deleting).
• Attaching files to emails.

By the end of this post, you'll be able to automate email communication in your workflows and make your daily tasks more efficient!

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Prerequisites: Setting Up Email Automation

Before you start automating emails, make sure you have the following:

• Power Automate Desktop installed on your machine.
• An email account (e.g., Outlook, Gmail, etc.).
• For Outlook users, you'll need to have Outlook installed on your computer.

Power Automate Desktop provides built-in actions to work with email applications like Outlook and SMTP servers (for sending emails via Gmail or other services).

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Key Actions for Email Automation in PAD

Power Automate Desktop offers several actions for automating email tasks. These actions include:

1. Send Email (Outlook): Sends an email through Microsoft Outlook.
2. Send Email (SMTP): Sends an email using an SMTP server (for Gmail, custom email services).
3. Read Email (Outlook): Reads incoming emails from an Outlook account.
4. Get Email Attachments (Outlook): Retrieves email attachments from an Outlook inbox.
5. Move Email (Outlook): Moves an email to a different folder in your Outlook account.
6. Delete Email (Outlook): Deletes an email from your Outlook account.

These actions allow you to send, read, organize, and manage emails automatically, without manual intervention.

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Example 1: Sending an Email with Outlook

Let’s start with a simple example where we send an email automatically using Outlook. This can be useful for sending notifications, reminders, or reports.

Step 1: Launch Outlook

First, you’ll need to have Outlook installed on your machine. Power Automate Desktop integrates directly with Outlook to send emails.

1. Add the Send Email (Outlook) action to your flow.
2. In the To field, specify the recipient's email address. You can also use variables here (e.g., if the recipient’s address is stored in a variable).
3. Fill out the Subject and Body fields with the content of your email. These can also be dynamic based on variables in your flow.

For example:

plaintext
To: john.doe@example.com
Subject: Automated Email - Reminder
Body: Hello John, this is a reminder that your report is due tomorrow. Please make sure to submit it on time.

Step 2: Sending the Email

Once the email details are set, the Send Email (Outlook) action will send the email to the specified recipient. You can customize the email body using variables, dynamic content, and even HTML for rich formatting.

Example using dynamic content:

plaintext
To: %EmailRecipient%
Subject: %EmailSubject%
Body: Hello %Name%, your report is ready for review.

Step 3: Attachments (Optional)

If you need to send an attachment, you can use the Add Attachment (Outlook) action. Just specify the file path of the attachment.

Example:

plaintext
Add Attachment: C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Report.pdf

This will send the email with the attached file.

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Example 2: Reading Emails from Outlook

Now let’s look at how to automate the process of reading incoming emails. This can be useful for extracting important information or processing incoming orders.

Step 1: Read Emails from Outlook

1. Add the Read Email (Outlook) action to your flow.
2. Choose the folder from which you want to read the emails (e.g., Inbox).
3. You can also specify filters such as unread emails, emails from a specific sender, or emails with a certain subject.

Example:

plaintext
Folder: Inbox
Filter: Unread emails

Step 2: Extract Email Content

Once the email is read, you can extract the content. The Read Email (Outlook) action will provide you with the email’s subject, body, sender, and other details, which you can store in variables.

For example:

plaintext
Subject: %EmailSubject%
Body: %EmailBody%
Sender: %EmailSender%

You can now use this data in your automation, like creating a report, saving the email details to a file, or triggering further actions based on the email content.

Step 3: Process Email Attachments

If the email contains attachments, you can retrieve them using the Get Email Attachments (Outlook) action. This allows you to download and save attachments, such as PDFs, images, or documents, for further processing.

Example:

plaintext
Get Email Attachments from: %EmailSubject%
Save Attachments to Folder: C:\Users\YourName\Downloads\EmailAttachments\

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Example 3: Organizing Emails Automatically

In addition to reading emails, Power Automate Desktop also allows you to automate the organization of emails, such as moving or deleting messages based on certain conditions.

Step 1: Move Emails

Let’s say you want to move all emails from a specific sender into a folder called Important.

1. Add the Move Email (Outlook) action.
2. Specify the From field (the email address of the sender) and the Destination Folder (e.g., Important).

Example:

plaintext
From: john.doe@example.com
Destination Folder: Important

Step 2: Delete Emails

If you need to automatically delete emails (for example, spam or old messages), use the Delete Email (Outlook) action.

1. Add the Delete Email (Outlook) action.
2. Specify the folder and filter (e.g., emails older than a certain date).

Example:

plaintext
Folder: Inbox
Filter: Emails older than 30 days

This will delete all emails that are older than 30 days in the Inbox.

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Example 4: Sending Automated Reports via Email

Let's create a scenario where an automation sends a report via email at a scheduled time (e.g., sending a daily report at the end of each day).

Step 1: Generate the Report

This could be any task, such as generating an Excel report, logging daily metrics, or summarizing activity. The automation can first complete the report generation using other PAD actions.

Step 2: Send the Report via Email

Once the report is generated, we’ll use the Send Email (Outlook) action to send it as an email attachment.

1. Specify the recipient's email.
2. Attach the report file (e.g., DailyReport.xlsx).
3. Write the body of the email.

Example:

plaintext
To: manager@example.com
Subject: Daily Report - %CurrentDate%
Body: Dear Manager, please find attached the daily report for your review.
Attachment: C:\Reports\DailyReport.xlsx

Step 3: Schedule the Flow

To automate this task to run daily, you can use Power Automate Cloud to trigger this PAD flow on a schedule, or you can use Windows Task Scheduler to run the PAD flow at a specific time.

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Conclusion

Automating email tasks in Power Automate Desktop can save you time and make your workflows more efficient. From sending personalized emails to reading and processing incoming messages, PAD provides a range of actions to interact with your email account. Whether you are automating reminders, generating reports, or organizing emails, Power Automate Desktop is a great tool for automating your email communication.

In this post, we’ve covered:

• Sending emails via Outlook.
• Reading and processing incoming emails.
• Organizing emails (moving and deleting).
• Sending automated reports via email.

Now it’s time to try out these email automation features in Power Automate Desktop! You'll find that once you automate your email tasks, you’ll be able to focus on more important aspects of your work.