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Analyze and retrieve emails with AI

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Posted on by JR-20041026-0

Hello everyone,

I am pretty new to power automate but I am trying to solve a major issue I have at work.
I want to measure my delivery performance by retrieving send times from emails that include a proof of delivery somewhere. But my team is receiving lots of emails like 700-1000 daily and they don't have time to check the timestamp by hand.
My issue is that POD is sometimes implied or formulated differently, sometimes only explained in screenshots.

Thus, my idea was to create an AI automated workflow going through my pile of emails, checking which files have been delivered and which one not yet. And I wanted to regroup all the different reference numbers with their timestamps into an excel table.

I believe this is doable and I am not the only one thinking of doing something similar. I started trying lots of stuff on Power automate, like API, GPT... but it is very easy to get lost or to forget about some key steps.
So if anyone knows how my problem could be solved, I would really appreciate some help !

Thanks a lot !

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11manish 3,333 on at

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Yes, your scenario can be automated using Power Automate with AI capabilities.

The recommended approach is to trigger on incoming emails, extract text from attachments using AI Builder (OCR), classify whether the email represents a proof of delivery, and then extract key details like reference number and timestamp using AI or GPT.

The results can then be stored in Excel for reporting. The key to success is combining filtering, OCR, and AI classification rather than relying only on rules or keywords.

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Haque 3,653 on at

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Hi @JR-20041026-0,

Seems like the approache you are trying achieve involves different areas. First we need to deocarate the emails conisidering POD behaviour where proof of delivery need to be accurate.

We need to do content analysis with AI and OCR

Use AI Builder or Azure Cognitive Services to analyze email bodies and attachments.

Apply OCR to extract text from screenshots or images that may contain delivery confirmations.

Use text classification or custom AI models to detect whether an email contains proof of delivery or not, even if the wording varies.

And then some routine task we need do is: Regroup different reference numbers with their timestamps into an Excel table, you can design a Power Automate Desktop flow that:

Extracts each reference number and its corresponding timestamp from your emails or documents.

Accumulates these pairs into a structured data table variable within PAD.

Write/appends this data table to an Excel worksheet, creating a clear table with columns like "Reference Number" and "Timestamp."

I am proposing a high-level outline of how to do this in PAD:

Initialize a DataTable variable with columns for Reference Number and Timestamp.

Loop through your source data (emails, parsed text, or files).

For each item, extract the reference number and timestamp using text parsing or regex.

Add a new row to the DataTable with these extracted values.

After processing all items, write the DataTable to an Excel file (either creating a new file or appending to an existing one).

I am sure some clues I tried to give. If these clues help to resolve the issue brought you by here, please don't forget to check the box Does this answer your question? At the same time, I am pretty sure you have liked the response!

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JR-20041026-0 22 on at

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Thank you both for your answers !

It gives me some new ways to look at the problem.

I agree with you on the way this should be done but I guess my only concern regarding your plans is budget wise.

I do have a huge amount of mails to analyze and I am afraid I will spend the tokens very fast.

If you have an idea on how I could optimize my workflow in order to be cost effective I would really appreciate it !

Should I use a different AI, should I pre-select more emails, let me know if you have a way !

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