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Download an email attachment with the new Office 365 Outlook actions?

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Posted on by mike689

I've been testing the new Office 365 Outlook actions that are native to Power Automate Desktop now and am finding them useful for quite a few things, but was curious if there is any function within Power Automate Desktop that I can use to actually download an email attachment using the attachment ID and/or message ID, etc?

I've been able to successfully use the Get Emails (V3) action to get the raw output of emails with a certain subject and attachment that are needed, and have been able to trim down the output to get the message ID and attachment ID values needed for the Get Attachment (V2) action, and from that output can get the contentBytes string associated with the attachment(s) but as far as actually downloading the attachment at that point strictly within Power Automate Desktop is where I am currently stuck. There doesn't seem to be a way to actually download the attachment with these new actions, or maybe I'm missing another way to do it.

Anyway, just looking to see if anyone might have a useful solution to this. Using Graph API to actually do the downloading bit is something I've considered, but not ideal. (Also I should mention, using the Outlook application is not something I'm looking to do within Power Automate Desktop for this, and yes I know all of this can be done within in a PA cloud flow rather easily but I am curious to see if these new Office 365 Outlook actions in Power Automate Desktop have any recourse to actually download an attachment and not just identify it's raw details.)

Thanks in advance for any responses!

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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The attachment content bytes are a base64-encoded string. You can use the Convert base64 to file action in PAD to convert it to a file.

You will need to provide a file name with an extension included for it to properly format the file. The extension is not really available in the attachment properties, but there is a property called "contentType" that can be used with some text manipulations. For instance, for PDF files it will be "application/pdf", for PNG images it will be "image/png", etc. So, if you want to process specific files, it should be easy, but if you want to process all attachments of various (dynamic) types, you will need to use Replace text to replace everything before the forward slash in the contentType property of the attachment first.
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kinuasa 795 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi,
I suggest using the 'Convert Base64 to file' action.
Below is a sample:

Base64 encoded text parameter: %GetEmailsV3Response.value[0].attachments[0].contentBytes%
File path parameter: C:\Test\Files\%GetEmailsV3Response.value[0].attachments[0].name%

Regards,
kinuasa

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