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Sending automatic reply emails to an email sent to a Teams Channel

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Posted on by finbar

Hello, I have a Teams Channel setup to receive emails that have a docx or pdf attachment. The sender is submitting a writing piece for a competition and by sending an email directly to a Teams Channel all the submissions are in one place, and all the members of the review committee can easily see the submissions. I would like to send an automated reply email, so that when a sender emails their work to the teams channel they get an automated reply acknowledging their submission.

I thought this would be really easy, because there is a Teams Trigger "when a new message is added..." to a channel and you can automatically start a flow. I figured I'd be able to grab the sender's email address from the message that appears in the Teams Channel and generate an automatic reply. I am having trouble getting the email address out of the message that appears in the Teams Channel. The "Get message details" action is giving "Null" for all sender information ("replyToID", "from", etc. all = "null" ). The sender's email is nowhere to be found, but I can see it listed in the Teams message visible in the channel. How do I access that string (the email address), so I can plug it into the "To" line in an email reply? I thought this would be very simple, but I can't get it to work. I am new at this, and I feel like there might be something obvious I am missing. I feel like it should be a simple flow like below if I could just get the sender's email address from the message details. Thanks!

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VictorIvanidze 13,073 on at

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Hi @finbar, it's a known bug - have a look at this. The only possible workaround I see is to create a contact for each external address (but I did not test it).

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RobElliott 10,323 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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@finbar if your channel users are all within your organisation then it is possible to do this with the following flow that starts off grabbing the message sender's displayName:

Although the Office 365 Users search for users action will result in an apply to each, don't worry about that; because the display name is unique it will only find and send the email to the person who posted the message.

If the users are not all in your organisation then you will need to use the workaround suggested by @VictorIvanidze and create a list of them (in excel or SharePoint for example).

Rob
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VictorIvanidze 13,073 on at

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Hi @finbar, I've spent some time trying to solve the problem (quite a challenged task!) and I can tell you there exists a way to get the sender address of any external email delivered to a team channel. I prefer not to publish my solution. Just be informed that's possible.

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finbar 4 on at

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@VictorIvanidze Thank you for noting that this is a bug on your first post. That does indeed complicate things.

@RobElliott fortunately these are coming from people inside my organization and your flow works very nicely for finding an email from the display name. One downside is for whatever reason, even though the emails are coming from addresses inside the organization, in TEAMS when it generates the post for the channel from the email, it doesn't show the display name, it just puts up the email address 'user@example.com' instead of 'Use" where the display name normally is, but unfortunately that email address isn't stored in message details as display name ( or in any of the other message details). It's strange, and a little annoying, but it must be tied to how TEAMS is doing the back end processing. For some reason it is stripping away the information about the message sender.

Does anyone know if TEAMS Channel email addresses have Outlook inboxes associated with them? If they did then I could just generate automatic replies from the outlook interface. I might just generate a separate email address for the messages to forward through before they make it to the channel, and then setup automatic replies through Outlook. It's one more step I was hopping to avoid, but it seems like that might be a simpler solution.

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VictorIvanidze 13,073 on at

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Hi @finbar,

regarding your Q "Does anyone know if TEAMS Channel email addresses have Outlook inboxes associated with them?" - have a look at https://neroblanco.co.uk/2019/11/where-do-emails-sent-to-the-the-default-microsoft-teams-email-address-go/

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