The Most Important Power Automate Action Sets – Week Day 2: Outlook / Office 365 Mail

After exploring SharePoint actions on Day 1, we move to another cornerstone of Power Automate: Outlook / Office 365 Mail. Email is still the heartbeat of modern business. Whether it’s approvals, notifications, or archiving, automating Outlook saves time and ensures consistency.

This article gives you a complete overview of the most important Outlook / Office 365 Mail actions, how to use them effectively, and best practices to avoid common pitfalls.

Connector Overview

The Outlook / Office 365 connector allows Power Automate to work directly with your business mailbox. With it, you can:

• Trigger flows when emails arrive, are flagged, or deleted
• Send professional emails with HTML and attachments
• Organize messages by moving, copying, or deleting
• Automate replies and forwards
• Work with shared mailboxes
• Manage calendar events, contacts, and categories
• Perform advanced operations through custom requests

Because nearly every organization relies on email, this connector is one of the most widely used in automation.

Key Triggers

When a new email arrives

Start a flow whenever a message is delivered to your inbox or a specific folder.

When an email is flagged

Useful for handling messages you’ve marked as important or actionable.

When an email is deleted or moved

Perfect for monitoring compliance, mailbox activity, or workflow tracking.

Best practice: Always scope triggers to the right folder and apply filters (subject, sender, attachments) where possible to avoid overload.

Key Actions

Send an email (V2)

The core action for creating and sending emails. Supports HTML formatting, CC/BCC, priority, and attachments.

Send an email from a shared mailbox

Ideal when communication must come from a team mailbox instead of a personal account.

Send an email with options

Lets you embed choices (e.g. Approve / Reject) into an email and process the recipient’s response.

Reply to or forward an email

Keeps conversation threads intact and automates responses.

Move, copy, or delete an email

Helps with mailbox organization, archiving, or compliance scenarios.

Get email

Retrieves the full content and metadata of a specific message, useful for processing attachments or parsing the body.

Advanced request action

When standard actions fall short, this option allows you to perform custom operations such as setting categories or updating message properties.

Patterns and Best Practices

Selective triggering

Use filters to ensure flows only run for relevant emails. For example, trigger only if the subject contains certain keywords.

Handling attachments

• Convert files to binary before attaching to outgoing messages.
• When dealing with multiple attachments, build an array of file objects to pass dynamically.

Shared mailboxes

Ensure you have “Send As” or “Send on behalf” permissions before sending from shared addresses. Decide whether the sent mail should stay in your personal Sent folder or in the shared mailbox’s Sent folder.

Error handling

• Configure run-after conditions to manage failures gracefully.
• Log errors in a SharePoint list or database for auditing.
• Build retry logic for temporary issues.

Looping wisely

Avoid unnecessary “Apply to each” loops. Combine data where possible to reduce iterations and improve performance.

Advanced Scenarios

VIP tagging

Automatically categorize emails from executives or important partners and send yourself an alert.

Email approvals

Send emails with options for quick decision-making. Capture the result and trigger different actions depending on the response.

Archiving emails

Save attachments and email content into SharePoint or OneDrive for structured storage and future reference.

Shared mailbox routing

Direct incoming emails in a support mailbox to the correct team or person based on keywords, sender domain, or message category.

Summary

On Day 2 of the “Most Important Power Automate Action Sets Week,” we explored Outlook / Office 365 Mail. Key takeaways:

• Triggers let you capture the right incoming emails without noise.
• Actions such as Send email, Reply, Move, and Send with options cover most business needs.
• Shared mailbox support and advanced request actions unlock team collaboration and customization.
• Following best practices around filtering, attachments, looping, and error handling ensures reliable and scalable flows.

By mastering these Outlook actions, you can automate communication, streamline approvals, and keep your business processes running smoothly.