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Creating New Contact Records from Incoming Email

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Posted on by karenfield

I'm new to the site and new to building flows. What I have done so far is asked that for every email that arrives in my inbox (Outlook) that a contact record be created with the email address and the given name and it get stored in a "new contact" folder.

What I am getting is multiples of the same address as many of the same people send emails throughout the day. What I would like it to do, is compare the email address to all of the email addresses in my "new contact" file and if it is there, do nothing. If it is not there then create the contact record.

I would love to be able to pick up phone numbers, company names and addresses automatically, but will be satisfied if I can just get those two pieces of information.

If this problem has already been solved or there is a template for it please let me know.

Best Regards

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Ed Gonzales 4,531 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Re: Creating New Contact Records from Incoming Email

@karenfield
Hi there! So, to get all of the information (company, phone, so on) you'll probably need a 3rd party app. Contacts + (Formerly FullContact) is one of my favorites because you can sync across multiple accounts, it grabs signatures, and has a pretty cool business card scanner.
Just getting the name and phone number is doable, but I don't know the expression to parse that out (especially since it isn't always uniformly presented).
I sketched something out that begins with
when a new email arrives
initializes a string variable (we'll need that later)
Gets all of the contacts then uses a condition to look for an instance when the eMail address in Contacts matches the From on the email.
This kicks off an Apply to Each loop because it is looking at each contact one at a time. Don't panic.
If it finds a match, update the variable to the email address of the From. If it doesn't, it leaves the variable as Null.
Outside of the "Apply to Each", we'll look to see if there's anything in the variable. If there's something in there, then the contact existed and there's no need to do anything. If it's blank, we add the email address and name (That's the expression I don't know, so I put the email address in both fields).
The Phone Number is required and you might not have that, so I put a bunch of 9's.
There was also this add-in for $15 USD that does the same thing. Totally up to you.

Keep us posted.
-Ed-

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v-bacao-msft on at

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Re: Creating New Contact Records from Incoming Email

Hi @karenfield ,

Perhaps you could try to configure Flow by referring to the following method.

Divide contacts into members of the organization and members outside the organization.

Personal information of Members within organization can be obtained through Get user profile action, but members of outside organization seem to only be able to save email addresses.

When receiving the email, use email address to determine if the current sender is already in contact list.

Use length() function to determine if there is a matching contact, and if not, create a new one.

Use Get user profile action to obtain personal information and configure two branches. The right branch can only be executed when Get user profile action fails.

Image reference:

Hope it helps.

Best Regards,

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Rhofie 8 on at

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Re: Creating New Contact Records from Incoming Email

Hi Barry,

Thank you for this proposed solution. I am trying to do something similar to the OP, but I want to create a new contact when I send an email. For this, I simply swapped out "From" to "To" and used my Sent Folder instead of Inbox, I did everything else the same as you suggested.

Your solution did work to create a new contact, however, it is creating multiple contact records for the same email address as I continue to test AND, it's creating records for internal contacts. Any suggestions?

Also, it shows "Flow run failed", even though it did what I wanted it to do (except for skipping existing and internal contacts). Is that expected?

Thanks so much for your help!

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Rhofie 8 on at

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Re: Creating New Contact Records from Incoming Email

I changed the Filter array to "does not contain" and that solved all of the issues mentioned above; no longer creating duplicates and no longer creating a contact record for internal contacts, and no longer showing as failed runs.

Thank you, @v-bacao-msft for your solution! I hope my tweaks help someone else who's trying to create contacts from emails sent.

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Rhofie 8 on at

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Re: Creating New Contact Records from Incoming Email

Unfortunately, this flow stopped working the day after I posted 😣. It's showing successful runs, but it's not creating any new contacts (intenal/external/duplicates of existing - none at all).
This is what a "successful" run looks like:

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