Creating items in sharepoint from external email address

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Posted on by sudosaurus

1,599 Super User 2024 Season 1

Hello,

I have a workflow setup that creates an item in SharePoint when an email is received in a shared mailbox.

I have a person picker / people column which is populated by the "From" of the Email address and when hovered over displays the users Office 365 profile information.

The problem I've now discovered is that if an email is received from either an external email address or a generic account that is not synced with Office 365 then the flow fails on the "Create item" step.

Is there any way I get get this to work and detect these external accounts and create the items in SharePoint?

The only way I've figured out so far is creating a new text column and this is filled by the email address however on default for this workflow I don't want all email addresses to use this method as want to be able to get O365 user information. Either that or populate the user information from the email and Get Profile (V2) into separate columns.

Thanks,

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Building flows

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manuelstgomes 6,625 on at

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HI @sudosaurus

The issue is that Power Automate is searching for that email address in Office 365 because, as you said correctly, it's external to the organization.

I would recommend, instead of a Person field in your SharePoint List, to have a text field where you store the email in a string format. Then you can fetch if needed in other Power Automates the details of the person if it's internal to your organization and have an email ready to use if the person is outside your organization.

Can you please check if and let me know if you have any questions?

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Cheers
Manuel

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sudosaurus 1,599 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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HI @manuelstgomes ,

I have created all the below as text fields but when sending from an external email its still complaining that it cannot find the user.
What am I doing wrong here?

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manuelstgomes 6,625 on at

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Hi @sudosaurus

You're using the email indeed, but you're requesting other fields from Office 365 (Display Name, Business Phones, etc.). Power Automate will still try to find the user to fetch that information, and since it's a Gmail user, for example, it can't find it displays the name on Office 365.

You need first to check if the user is an Office 365 user. If it is, then you can collect all that information. If not, you can only collect the email since it's the only information you have.

To check you can do the following. First, get the information about that email from Office. If it can receive it, then you have information to save; if not, then it returns an error, and you only have the email. Here's what you need to do:

Global check:

Create a parallel branch:

Select "Configure Run After"

Then select it to run after errors.

Can you please check if and let me know if you have any questions?

If I have answered your question, please mark your post as Solved.
If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

Cheers
Manuel

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