This is a great use case, but there are a few important things to be aware of depending on how you approach it.
Option 1: Power Automate (for ongoing automation)
You can build a flow to read emails and extract sender addresses, but counting them directly inside Power Automate has limitations.
A reliable pattern would be:
- Use Get emails (V3) and point it to your folder (enable pagination if needed)
- Add a Select action to extract sender email using:
item()?['from']?['emailAddress']?['address']
- This gives you a clean list of email addresses
At this point, instead of trying to count inside the flow, send the data to:
- Excel (table)
- SharePoint list
Then use grouping or reporting there.
Trying to maintain counts inside a loop with variables can cause issues due to self-referencing limitations and concurrency conflicts.
Option 2: Excel (fastest for one-time analysis)
If you just need a quick summary:
- Export the Outlook folder to Excel
- Insert a Pivot Table
- Put the Sender column in Rows and Values (Count)
This gives you an instant summary of how many emails came from each address.
Option 3: Power BI (best for reporting)
If you want ongoing insights:
- Connect Power BI to your mailbox or exported data
- Group by sender
- Build a simple report or dashboard
Summary
Use Power Automate if you need automation, but avoid counting logic inside loops
Use Excel for quick analysis
Use Power BI for ongoing reporting and trends
This approach keeps things simple and avoids common pitfalls with loops and variables in Power Automate.
✅ If this answer helped resolve your issue, please mark it as Accepted so it can help others with the same problem.
👍 Feel free to Like the post if you found it useful.
Share
Report
All responses (
Answers (
2,195
