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Flow that will create a new Microsoft List item for a new email but update an existing List item if the email is a reply

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Posted on by JBass21

Good afternoon!

We are attempting to use Microsoft Lists and Power Automate to build a ticketing system for our HR support team. I've got a flow working that will create a List item whenever a new email comes in to our shared People Support inbox. However, replies to the same email thread create new list items as well. What we want is if a List item already exists for a particular thread/conversation ID, it should update the description of that list item with the reply rather than create a whole new list item. If a List item doesn't already exist for that conversation ID, it should create a new List item.

See attached the working flow that creates new list items and the broken flow that is supposed to either create a new item OR update an existing item. Hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction. 🙂

Working flow and ...

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SudeepGhatakNZ 14,396 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@JBass21

You can achieve this by creating a rule in Outlook for shared mailbox to filter out the automatic replies by moving them to another folder. If the rule runs at the exchange server, then flow does not consider the automatic replies for trigger.

https://nhlearningsolutions.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-automatic-replies-in-microsoft-outlook

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JBass21 13 on at

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Hi Sudeep!

Thank you for the response but this wouldn't update the existing List item with the reply would it? Also it's not automatic replies I'm concerned with, it's actual replies.

The idea would be that our HR team would still communicate with the person sending in the email through our shared email, so we need to capture their replies in the List items/tickets.

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SudeepGhatakNZ 14,396 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Got it! Okay let's try this.

Since your first flow is working, can you append the list item id to the Subject message?

When people reply to that email thread, simply add a logic to check if the email has a list item ID then update else create

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JBass21 13 on at

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This sounds promising! But do you happen to know what action to select to edit an email subject line? What I found online said that there wasn't a default action but the solution I found at this site keeps giving me a Bad Request error with a JSON issue. I think it also isn't set up to tie the specific List ID variable to the email. It's just to insert specific text to all emails. https://www.matthewdevaney.com/how-to-change-an-email-subject-in-power-automate/#:~:text=There%20is%20not%20any%20Power,and%20select%20the%20PATCH%20method.

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JBass21 13 on at

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Bumping this up. Thanks!

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SudeepGhatakNZ 14,396 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I will get back to you today.

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SudeepGhatakNZ 14,396 Most Valuable Professional on at

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This is what I was suggesting. You need not change the subject, instead just email back with the same subject and body.

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JBass21 13 on at

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I'm still having to tweak some things but I think this is going to work! Thank you so much Sudeep! For future reference if anyone else tries to build this, I had to add a step to convert the email body to from HTML to Text. Otherwise it copied a bunch of gibberish into the item description.

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