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Flow No Longer Triggering When Email hits Inbox

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Posted on by thetravis12

For some reason, a procedure I've followed many times before is now failing to even trigger the beginning of a Power Automate flow. When an e-mail hits a folder in my inbox, I would like the flow to begin and drop a copy of the attachments, and the body of the email, in a dated folder on a SharePoint site. I have succeeded with this procedure many times before. Now, when I drop a new e-mail in the designated folder in Outlook, nothing happens. Each time I try to test the flow by dragging and dropping a new email to the designated folder, the interface stalls and eventually reports "Flow run timed out because the starting action was not performed." I have attached an exported zipfile of the flow. Looking for anyone who can help solve this mystery so I can at least get started troubleshooting the rest of my workflow.

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ManishSolanki 15,091 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @thetravis12

As a workaround, pls try readding the trigger action "When an email arrives". Set the required parameters and rested the flow.

If this helps & solves your problem, please remember to give a 👍 and accept my solution as it will help others in the future.

Thanks

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thetravis12 8 on at

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Hi @ManishSolanki

Are you asking me to delete the trigger and add it back in? I've done that several times. It's also not a trivial process because when the trigger is deleted, many of the outputs from that step are deleted from other parts of the code and have to be re-added.

Here is a question; I noticed that the flow actually triggered a few times as I was going about my day (still haven't confirmed that the rest of the code works, but at least it triggered). Here is how I have been trying to trigger the flow:
1. Move an old e-mail with an attachment out of the target folder and into my generic inbox
2. Mark that e-mail as unread
3. Start the Test for the flow and select "Manual" trigger
4. Move the e-mail with an attachment back to the target folder

I noticed that the flow actually did trigger when I moved an e-mail that was the most recent e-mail I had received. But when I move any other e-mail from my inbox, it does not seem to work.

Does the trigger somehow 'know' whether an e-mail I'm moving into the target folder is 'old', somehow?

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ManishSolanki 15,091 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @thetravis12,

I could not import the flow which you have shared as it is throwing errors during import operation.

I guess, if you are using "Get emails" action then there is flag "Fetch Only Unread Messages" which works only for new emails or only unread emails. To get all emails (read or unread), you could set the flat value to "No" as shown below:

If the flag is set to "Yes" then it wouldn't fetch old or read email in the mail folder.

If this helps & solves your problem, please remember to give a 👍 and accept my solution as it will help others in the future.

Thanks

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thetravis12 8 on at

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I am not using the "Get Emails" action. I am using the trigger "When a new email arrives (V3)". See image below.

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wskinnermctc 6,519 Moderator on at

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The trigger does know if an email is old, sort of. See Outlook Connector - Known Issues

It uses something like the last trigger or the last time it was the inbox was checked for new messages which is like every 5 minutes or something which is why it is not always instant.

I know I have seen users with issues with the Power Automate connector to Outlook when it comes to dealing with folders. They either have to set up Rules in Outlook, or do some type of Get Emails action and filter to the item they want.

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thetravis12 8 on at

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Ahhhhhh HA! Look at this condition:
"Triggers are based on the date and time an email was received. Moving an email to another folder does not change the received date property value, so the triggers will skip any email that was received prior to the latest successful run."
So...hm...yes, I see the issue. If I drag-and-drop all my e-mails in chronological order (or, immediately, as they appear in my inbox), this flow should work. If I start at the top of my inbox and drag e-mails to the folder, the flow will (probably) miss all of the e-mails except one, because it will look at all the other e-mails and say "The date of my most recent successful run is later than the date of that e-mail, so I do nothing.
I can think of a few ways to work around the issue - some of which you described - but the best thing to do might be to just set up a rule that auto-drops the incoming e-mails into the target folder. I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of the "Get Emails" action but I could foresee that being a potential solution as well.
I'd like to wait a couple days before I mark this as the accepted solution, just to confirm that this is indeed what's happening, but this is a great answer and it seems highly probable that this is the issue.
Thank you!

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