Monitor shared mailbox with Power Automate #PowerAutomate #Outlook

hi there folks in today's demonstration I'm going to show you how we can use power automate to monitor a shared mailbox so if you're the owner of a share mailbox ever had that heart syncing moment where you suddenly thought I haven't checked that mailbox for a number of weeks what if we could use power automate to monitor that mailbox for you and send you a nice little convenient notification once a week say with a number of emails that are sat there unread and a little table of information with subject receive date sender Etc well that's exactly what I'm going to show you how we can build step by step in today's video so if that's something that interests you please make sure you watch on don't forget to like And subscribe and without further Ado let's jump into the demonstration so I'm going to start things off in my shared mailbox and I currently have seven emails and I'm gonna Mark a few of these so that they're currently recorded as red and you can see the count now has been dropped down to five now this is important during this demonstration because I would like to provide a summary of unread emails in this inbox moving on to power automate I'm going to use a recurrence trigger because I would like this flow to run every week so I'm going to change the frequency onto week and then drop open the advanced options where I need to set the time zone in which case mine is the UTC plus zero the start time is always important to make sure you set that to a date or time in the future so because today is the Sunday I would like this to run from Monday which is tomorrow I'm going to put in 2023.0605 a t for time and then you can put in the exact time you'd like it to start but if I have it triggering from Midnight it will start based on the time that I specify in the hours here so we'll go with on the days and we'll choose Monday and for the hours I'm going to set that to nine and so because I've set that start time to midnight tonight or tomorrow um it will begin from the Monday which is tomorrow and it will start at nine o'clock and so everyone Monday at nine this flow will trigger moving on to our next action we'd like to get our emails and so with the get emails version 3 action there are a couple of things we need to set the first thing is the original mailbox address now this is based on our shared mailbox and if I search for feedback which is the name of my shared mailbox you'll see it's popping up there this will mean that I'm now going to start getting all those emails from the inbox based on them being unread so we have this parameter in the drop down a yes or no fetch only unread messages I'm going to keep this to yes because all I want is a summary of those unread messages another parameter which is of Interest we have a top count now that top count is currently set to 10 you can increase it to a maximum of 25 but whilst you may have a mailbox of hundreds and thousands of of emails it's worth recognizing that there is this fixed limitation so upper map maximum 25 ultimately what we want to do is we want to be able to notify ourselves that we have some new messages in this shared mailbox next it'd be quite nice to provide a nice visual summary so I'm going to use create HTML and we'll go ahead and create the HTML table using the value from our action above so you'll see a list of the response objects in the form of value and whilst this would create an HTML table for us we want to limit The Columns that come back so the columns are currently automatic it's based on all the dynamic data we're going to set this to custom because there are only four columns that I'd like to return and they are from subject importance and the received date time and then all we have to do is jump into the value here and pick the respective Dynamic value from the right hand side so we'll go ahead and pick from subject the importance and I'll have to search for date there we go received time which is in fact the received date time now because the received date time comes back as an ISO 8601 string I think it'd be quite useful to turn this out into a more usable date time string so I'm actually going to remove this and I'm going to go into the expression Tab and I'm going to type in format date time I can then put in the open and close brackets choose the dynamic content panic because I can't see the dynamic value but earlier when I hovered my mouse over that Dynamic action I could see that it was based on the expression item open close brackets question mark and the value or the key received date time next up what I need to do is put in a comma and this is where I can specify the new format of our date time string so I think it'd be quite useful to first of all have the days at the beginning so lowercase Double D's we have an uppercase M for the month which will give us the numerical but if I put in three uppercase M's I'll get the shorthand version of the month if I put in four I'll get the long version of the month and then I can put in the years in the form of lowercase wise we'll go with the hours a semicolon lowercase M's and I think that'll do it so I don't need to worry about including the second so we'll have a nicely formatted date time string which will give us a days as a number the month as a full string and the year as a number followed by the hours and the minutes so we'll go ahead and hit OK then all we need to do is to add an action to send the email so we can get that email back to ourselves to remind us that in fact there are group emails waiting for us to process so I searched for my mailbox will go with my demo bar 365 I'll choose the subject so I'll say their weekly alert but I think it'd be quite useful to have a count in the subject and we can do that using the length expression so length open close brackets interdynamic content and choose value and that will now give us the number of emails that have been retrieved from the get emails action go ahead and hit OK and we can include also the word email so we'll get a subject that'll say weekly alert three emails for instance in the body all I really want to do at this point is to supply the HTML table and then we can go ahead and save and test or put the flow into test mode we can set it to manual and hit the test button and run our flow if I jump across onto my email you can see now I've received this summary it tells me that there are five emails and we get this summary here it doesn't look too good on the eye so maybe we need to add a bit of formatting just so it's a bit easier for us to read the rows that are in this table but we have that count right and we've also changed the format of the date which looks a lot nicer than it would have been had it been in the iso 8601 format so we'll jump back onto my feedback inbox I'm going to Mark a couple more of those emails as read and we'll get that countdown we now have three and if we go back into our flow we can go and edit that flow and we can try and change the format of that table so it looks slightly more professional so we'll go ahead and hit the plus I'm going to add in another action just above that send email called a compose and with that I'm going to insert some HTML and this HTML is called a CSS style sheet for tables and it just so happens if I jump across onto this W3 doc site which I'll include in the description it has some sample style sheets for us so one of the examples is based on horizontal dividers and if I go into the try it yourself we can see here the table could have these lovely little lines between it but we also have one further down here which creates a hoverable table and again if we try that ourselves we can see that as we hover up and down those rows become highlighted the other option we've got is a zebra stripe table which pretty awful colors we could look to change that ourselves but if that's something you're looking for again you have the sample code here that you can copy I'm going to go with the hoverable rose and in order for me to implement this in my low I need to copy everything that's included in the style tags both the opening style and the closing style tag here I can control C to copy it jump back onto my flow into my compose and paste that in and that will give me the code for a nicely styled HTML table I need to get that into my email so if I put my cursor in front of the HTML it must be in front not after the HTML table I can then insert that compose so I should end up with the first compose being the output of our compose containing the style sheet and the second being the body of our HTML table when I now go ahead and test this we'll get a nicely formatted HTML table we'll go ahead and run that and if we jump back across onto my email we'll see that we now have that neatly formatted email the alert tells us we have three emails because of course we read a couple of those email and we have a slightly more professional looking table with that hoverable row now what if you don't want your summary to come in via email maybe you'd like it to come in Via teams so if we jump back to our flow I'll keep the original actions in here to send us the email but I'm also going to look up post message and this will allow us to post a message into a chat or a channel so maybe you might want the message to come to yourself in which case we could choose Post in chat with the flowbot but equally you might want it to go into a channel so that people within your team can be made aware of the summary of emails that are currently sitting in your shared mailbox so I'm going to choose a team in this case it's going to be my demo bar 365 my channel I've created specifically a feedback group Channel and like before provide a quick summary of how many emails are currently sitting there as unread so you have and then we'll go into the expression tab type in length with the open and close brackets into Dynamic content and choose value say okay to that so you have however many emails unread and if I return a couple of times I can insert that HTML table now the unfortunate thing about posting a message in a chat or a channel using HTML is that we can't use style sheets or certainly I haven't been able to find out how we can use style sheets to make it look a bit prettier you might want to consider using an Adaptive card which will give you a nice structured adaptive card and I can do a video about that if that's something you're interested in but for the purpose of the demo if I go ahead and save and test this we can have a look at the output within our feedback channel on my 365 team so we'll jump onto my team you can see now I have a summary I've got three unread and there are three rows in my HTML table if I was to jump back into my share mailbox here and select all of these emails and mark them all as unread back into my flow and we'll go ahead and test that one more time we've now got seven emails that are unread and jumping on to my email again we can have a look at that summary we can see now we have seven emails unread and we have our HTML table with those seven emails equally jump over onto teams our latest post here shows that we have seven unread emails with the summary of those seven emails in our shared mailbox so some other things you might want to consider you might want to insert some conditional logic so if there are no emails you might want to send a different message or a different email and the way that you do that is we go into add an action here probably before we've sent that email out we can search for condition with that condition we can specify that it checks the length because if we know that the length or the number of emails is zero So based on length Dynamic content we can choose value here say okay if the length is equal to zero we know that we have no emails in which case we could add in an action here to send an email to ourselves to say no emails in your shared mailbox and at least then you won't get an empty HTML table now at the moment this conditional check is equal to zero is send an email to say no emails in your shared mailbox if it's not equal to zero you want it to send your email with the HTML table and the team's message so we'll drag that up into the no branch and if we go ahead and test this I'll go and Mark all those emails in this mailbox so we know that they are all Now red put this into test mode manually test it run that flow and if we jump back into my email again we can see that I have the message to say that there are no emails in my shared mailbox if I was to go and Mark one of these messages as unread put it back into test mode run that flow and if we jump back into my email we can see we now have that one email with our HTML table because of course what will have happened is the condition will have resolved as false because the length was not equal to zero in this case Branch right send an email and also post a message in our chart channel here which we can see you have one unread email so as a final bonus to my videos I'm going to start showing you both the existing editor that you see on the screen here versus the new editor which has just been announced as a preview feature so there's no need to panic yet nothing has changed but it's just to make you aware of what is coming that is a new designer the functionality is exactly the same you're still going to have triggers and actions and have to set various parameters and these two flows both this one here with our recurrence our get emails create HTML table compose and condition that we just built is exactly the same same as this one you see here again with our occurrence get emails our create HTML table compose and our condition hopefully by sharing this information with you now you'll be ready to get going with this new designer when it eventually drops as general availability if you've got this far thanks very much for watching and I hope to see you again sometime soon cheers foreign

Channel: DamoBird365

Views: 5,897

Keywords: Power Automate, Shared Mailbox, Automation Tutorial, Email Management, Workflow Automation, Microsoft Teams, Email Monitoring, Power Automate Designer, Step-by-Step Guide, Weekly Automation, Email Count, Subject, Sender, Received Date, Power Automate Tutorial, DamoBird365, Power Automate Designer, power automate flow designer, power automate flow examples, power automate flow ideas

Id: 6KGo1Fi2ZP8

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023