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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Workaround to trigger ...
Power Automate
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Workaround to trigger a flow from Outlook message category

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Posted on by 2
So as of yet, I know there is no official trigger where when we assign a category to an email message, that Power Automate can perform an action.
 
In another post, I found part of a workaround which uses the following actions:  
  • Send an HTTP request (for Outlook); and
  • Parse JSON.
I got those to work (see image below), but the following actions, whether I use a Compose action, Variable action or a 'For each', etc., I am getting an error message to say answer type 'NULL', however you will also see as part of the image, part of the RAW Output from the Parse JSON action, that it did pull some information.
 
I am at a lost...
 
 
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  • Suggested answer
    David_MA Profile Picture
    14,956 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Since you show unconfigured actions instead of how the actions are configured, I don't know what you did wrong. But, set it up like this:
     
     
    The condition checks to make sure items were returned from the HTTP request. Since the error message says null was returned (meaning nothing matched your filter query), zero items were returned. The apply to each action requires an array. So checking to make sure that more than 0 items are returned will fix the issue if everything else was set up like above.
     
    You can use the length() expression in the condition to count the number of items in an array: length(body('Parse_JSON')?['value'])
  • WannaBE PowerPlayer Profile Picture
    2 on at
    Hello @David_MA,
    and thank you for responding to my query.
     
    Sorry I have not yet tried your suggestion.  In the time waiting for my question to go live, I managed to find a workaround that seems to work.  Will keep this in my back pocket in case it doesn't.
     
    I do wish PowerAutomate would add this as a trigger, alot of people seem to looking for this action!

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