How to Get Flagged Outlook Emails into ToDoist w/ URLs without Duplicates or Due Time?

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Posted on 3 Jan 2025 16:19:17 by CU03011618-0

What's the best way to get flagged Outlook Messages from Outlook hosted in a business Microsoft 365 account into ToDoist with URLs to access the direct messages that were flagged?

As discussed all over the web, the prebuilt Power Automate flow for creating ToDoist Tasks when Flagging an Outlook Message does not work...and unfortunately, I've been unsuccessful in finding something that works reliably in my desired format.

Goal - When an Outlook message is flagged from any device (web, desktop, or mobile), create a new Task in ToDoist that has the following attributes:

Due Today without time set
Uses the Email Message Subject as the Task Title
Appends the Task Title with a hyperlink to the Outlook Message in the Web
Appends the Task Title with a hyperlink to the Outlook Message for iOS

Latest Attempt - Per the setup shown in the screenshots below, each flagged message from any devices does successfully creates a new ToDoist Task with the Email Subject in the Title, provides a hyperlink to the message in Outlook Message in the Web and in iOS, BUT sets the due time to when the flow executed (therefore already "overdue" in ToDoist) AND duplicates the task, so there are multiple entries in ToDoist.

r/todoist - Power Automate Trigger — Power Automate Trigger

r/todoist - Power Automate Action — Power Automate Action

Remaining Issues to Solve

Due Date WITHOUT Time - For Due Date, I've tried so many combinations, searched, asked CoPilot and ChatGPT, but the best I've been able to get so far is just due date now with the current time. Has anyone been able to get Power Automate to create ToDoist tasks without a Due Time?
Duplicate Tasks in ToDoist - Has anyone been able to stop this duplicate task creation issue?

Appreciate any help or ideas here!

Categories:

Business Process Flows

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CU03011618-0 2 on 03 Jan 2025 at 18:44:09

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How to Get Flagged Outlook Emails into ToDoist w/ URLs without Duplicates or Due Time?

Thanks for the response. I'm testing this with only one ToDoist and one 365 hosted inbox, so there's no worry of duplication from multiple users.

Re: Due Date - I've tested a variety of permutations and I want this due today without date. utcNow() sets it due for today at the time it was created. If I set it to utcNow('yyyy-MM-dd'), it results in 7PM yesterday. So it appears it adds the time despite not giving it that information in the Due Date field. I didn't document all of the permutations I've tried so far, but the best I've come up with is the one that sets it due at this exact moment...I just wish it would exclude the time.

Re: Duplication - I've started messing with the List tasks (V4) function and then built a condition to check, but I haven't yet figured out the magic path to make this work. It appears to still be duplicating them when the messages are flagged from the iOS Outlook app, but not from the desktop or web Outlook apps.
Suggested answer

Mark Nanneman 989 Super User 2025 Season 1 on 03 Jan 2025 at 17:01:58

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How to Get Flagged Outlook Emails into ToDoist w/ URLs without Duplicates or Due Time?

Due Date Issue:

utcNow() literally provides the exact current time that expression is run. You would probalby want to add days to the current time.

You could use the "Get Future Time" action

E.g. To get the time one week from now:

You could also do it in an expression if you are comfortable with that.

If you want to format the date string so that it doesn't include the time, you could do something like:

Just make sure to use MM for month, mm returns minutes.

Duplicate Issue:

I'd recommend investigating your flow run log to see if the flow is being triggered multiple times for the same email. If multiple users share copies of the flow, maybe emails with multiple recipients are being flagged and triggering it?

one thing I like to do to avoid creating duplicate records is to do a "List" type action before adding the new record. I'm not experienced with Todoist, but I see they have a "List tasks (v4)" action. Perhaps you can just check if the same title you're going to create already exists, and only create a new record if no tasks are returned from the "List tasks" action.

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Power Platform Developer | LinkedIn: Mark Nanneman | Blog: Power Stuff | YouTube: Mark's Power Stuff |