The challenge of automating email has been around almost as long as email itself. As we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, many solutions have been developed to address this over the years using technologies such as VBA scripting, Outlook rules, and COM add-ins. These solutions have required both programming skills to develop and a dependence on a desktop computer always running to be able to execute the commands.
With Power Automate and Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, or Gmail services, the necessary components are "always on," so you don't need to worry about power outages, software updates, or network connectivity issues disrupting a business process. In this section, we're going to look at options for handling incoming emails, processing attachments, and sending messages.
Receiving email
Many organizations use the receiving of an email (typically, to some sort of shared mailbox) as a sort of trigger to start a business process. This could...