Microsoft 365 Outlook

This is a timely post. Myself and the team have been busy building out API Tasks that leverage the Outlook 365 package. We’re using it to streamline the registration process for the Agentic Process Automation Training Camp. Our use case is slightly different to your ask as we’re sending out huge numbers of emails rather than receiving them...but my learnings are that if you can work with your IT and Infosec teams to allow you to have an OAuth2 connection and delegated mail permissions, in Azure, well that’s as close to an automation utopia as you can get 😂. (Sidenote: OAuth is a pain to initially setup but after that, a joy to work with).

My findings in building this way are that we can send out tens (sometimes even 100s) of emails in one go, in an API task that runs for less than 10 seconds. We can then also write any logging to Excel via the same OAuth connection and on error, easily send an email to the appropriate team (assuming it’s not the Outlook Graph APIs that are affected).

If you couple API Tasks with the new event triggers, whereby an Outlook email can trigger an API Task, then that could be a very efficient use case for a large volume of emails that I would imagine have peaks and troughs throughout the day.

In terms of practical tips, I’ve found the “connect” package to be the most “expensive” in terms of taking a lot of time to run. So I was super conscious to make sure we were only connecting once throughout the whole task. Make sure you give your Bot Runner or API Task Runner access to the OAuth connections. Also make sure they both have the ability to read and edit credential attributes (so they can save OAuth tokens in the CR).

AA should publish their own Azure app which can be granted delegate access like other Automation Platforms.

AA bot agent already has access to infra, machine credentials, any data on that machine etc. and having delegate access should not be an issue. Being a low code tool, it should allow as easy setup as possible for users.

Thanks ​@Oli.Morris for sharing your learnings. Very Insightful.

I am looking specifically for the following items:

1. How to get the total count of emails from the mailbox or within a specific folder?
2. Can I get more than 50 emails in one shot using this command package?