Cannot Get Email Attachment From 'When A New Email Arrives V3' Trigger nor Get Email (V2). Issues with greyed out 'for each', empty email attachment array.

[AndyJ9]

Hello,

I am trying to setup a flow to save email attachments to a onedrive folder. I have gotten this type of flow to work occasionally, but very frequently emails are skipped. For example if I receive 4 emails in a minute the flow will typically only process the last one.

At first, I thought this was an issue with the default 'for each' loop that powerautomate applies when you try to save attachments from an email. I thought this because many times when the flow wouldn't save the attachment BUT still 'run successfully' the for each loop was greyed out. I later learned that this is because the attachment array was seen as empty by powerautomate at the time the for each loop was run... BUT there is an attachment on the email (I verified that the trigger does say attachments: yes) although the trigger returns the attachments array as attachments: []. 

My next assumption is that the ADP scan that runs on attachments arriving in my email is confusing powerautomate. This makes some sense because if I try to download an attachment right when an email arrives I get a useless file in my downloads folder (essentially empty and not the actual attachment file, which does appear after about 2 minutes). The attached screenshots are my attempt to run a loop to check when the attachments array actually becomes populated. However, it still fails on about 75% of the emails and the 'Do Until' loop times out after 7 minutes (which is definitely much longer than it takes for the actual attachment to be available to me in outlook). 

Since the loop is failing, I'm wondering if I should be checking for the attachment array size a different way. Or if there is a better way to consistently save attachments to onedrive when the emails arrive in batches and typically seem to not have attachments available for a couple minutes.

  

 

 

 

[CFernandes]

@AndyJ9 Your Power Automate looks correct but I usually try to get attachments using the approach below -

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[Pstork1]

As long as you tell the trigger to include the attachments you can do it with a very short flow.

As to why it may be missing emails with attachments when they come in together double check that your settings have Split ON enabled. Otherwise the flow will try to run on a collection of emails rather than each one.

[AndyJ9]

Hello and thank you for taking the time to reply! @CFernandes  @Pstork1. I understand your recommendation for the default way to save attachments. If I remember correctly, this is the template that microsoft provides and I thought it would work for myself. Unfortunately, I have never had consistent success with the 'for each' loop. Whenever I receive emails I can see in my inbox that they have attachments, but the powerautomate trigger does not see them. See below for the errors I get. The first one shows how the default attachment processing does not work, since the trigger shows the attachment array to be empty, it just skips over the 'for each loop' and doesn't create the file in onedrive. (for reference the file type in the attachment is always a .xls)

The next screenshot is my attempt to workaround that and at least see the failures instead of getting false successful runs like the above. I decided to use an expression to pull the first item from the attachments array. At least in that case, I can see which runs had issues with the empty attachment array.

Below is some of the trigger's raw output to hopefully illustrate the crux of my problem. You can assume that the output looks like that every time I get the error of the above screenshots. (The issue is that there IS an attachment but the attachment array is returned as empty).

(Also thank you for the recommendation @Pstork1, I checked and split is set to ON currently.)

Thank you,

Andy

 

[Pstork1]

The templates are good for learning patterns for how things can be done, but I don't recommend trying to use them instead of building your own flow from scratch. The problem is that as the actions and triggers are updated the templates usually aren't.  So they often break or have peculiar results.  Try building a simple flow for yourself and specify in the advanced settings of the trigger that it should only run if the email contains attachments.   I'm not sure where the inconsistent results are coming from in your setup but I suspect its because of changes that have been made to Outlook that cause problems for an old version of the trigger since its coming from a template.

[elinevans]

I don't know if you ever found a solution to this but I had a similar problem and as you suggested I think it was something to do with the attachments being scanned in my emails that confused it. I just added a delay step of 3 minutes after the "When the new email arrives" trigger which gives my emails enough time to scan the attachment before the flow continues. Not sure if it's fool-proof yet but seems to have worked over the last couple of days 🙂 

[AndyJ9]

Thanks for mentioning! I believe I tried something similar with a delays of anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes, but could never get that to work consistently for myself. It has been awhile since I ran this flow though, so that might be a good solution to try first; if the functionality has improved since I attempted this.

[spencerjmueller]

I tried switching to the old designer, but I still see the Attachments Attachment ID and Message ID match.