Staying Aware of Important Automated Emails with Microsoft Flow

 Staying Aware of Important Automated Emails with Microsoft Flow

As I mentioned in the excerpt of this article, I get to use an awesome tool called Sprinklr to stay ahead of the game with Twitter because I manage the Microsoft Flow Twitter account! This tool sends me an email every time one of my scheduled Tweets goes live. I don't know if you follow the Flow Twitter page, but that's 5 or more Tweets daily that I am alerted about via automated emails! This is why they all get moved to their own folder automatically via an email rule in Outlook. 

These emails get stacked up quickly because I receive at least 5 of them per day. I can turn these automated emails off but personally, I find some reassurance in seeing the daily emails. You could say it lets me know that things are up and running smoothly, in a way. Recently one of these automated emails had a different subject than I've seen so far. It read, "Your Tweet could not be published". This startled me, and I quickly searched the rest of the folder to make sure that this hadn't happened before without me noticing because that would mean I wasn't doing a thorough enough sweep when I checked that folder once per week. Thankfully, this was the only email in the folder that had a subject notifying me of Tweet publication failure.

This gave me a great Flow idea almost instantly!

I jumped over to https://Flow.Microsoft.com and created a new Flow that searches the subject of each automated email coming into the folder for the keywords "Your post could not be published".

Let's build the Flow!!

 1. First, start your Flow with the trigger for "When a new email arrives" and choose where you'd like Flow to scan for your automated emails:

2. Make sure to fill out the "Subject Filter" field with the correct automated email subject that you'd like Flow to scan for (My subject filter is "Post failed to Publish"):

3. Next, create a "Move Email" action that will move the email once its subject has triggered the first step. Click the "Message Id" field and then select "Message Id" from the dynamic content panel that pops up:

4. In the "Folder" field, make sure you select the folder that you'd like the automated email to be moved into (I send mine straight to my Inbox): 

5. Create a final step "Send me a mobile notification" to make sure you are aware that this important automated email has made it into your Inbox:

6. Give it a pretty title, click "Save", and hope that it never has to run!

This is a very simple and very important way that I utilize Flow to stay on top of crucial information and I'm realizing now that one by one my important alerts and notifications are all becoming automated with the use of Flow. I am okay with this because it frees up the mental space in my head for more important things! Some Flows are constantly being triggered and running non-stop to complete a number of important tasks and duties throughout the workplace, but this a Flow that I hope never gets triggered! That being said, if it does run I'll know exactly when and why a Tweet was not published instead of finding out the next morning!

Thanks for reading!

-Gabriel

Microsoft Flow Community Manager