Extract only the text from the latest reply in an email thread when using "when a new email arrives"

[shaykalyan]

Hello,

Is it possible to extract only the latest response in an email thread instead of the entire body? 

For my scenario, I need to act upon each reply to an email thread with only the content from the latest response.

Thanks!

[v-yamao-msft]

Hi @shaykalyan,

I am not sure with your scenario, do you want to get the content from the email every time a you get a reply?

Could you show me more details on your scenario for better understanding.

Best regards,

Mabel Mao

[shaykalyan]

Hi Mabel,

Sure, I'll try to describe further what I'm after. In my scenario, I would like to use the content from the latest email response in an email thread. I know that there is the "Body" dynamic content, however, for email threads with multiple responses, the "Body" content will contain replies from earlier responses as well as the latest response.

For example, here is the Body from a new email: 

"""

Initial mail content

"""

Then someone replies to the thread. The dynamic Body is now:

"""

Reply content

---------------------------------------

TO: ....

CC: ....

Subject: ...

---------------------------------------

Initial mail content

""""

The next reply to the thread will again have all of the history from the email in the dynamic Body variable.

What I would like to get is only the latest response in the thread and not all the other responses as well. Is this possible without doing manual string manipulation? 

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi, I am working on the same thing, I want to extract only the latest reply (exclude all the original body of the email). Can anyone help? Thanks!

---

@shaykalyan wrote:

Hello,

Is it possible to extract only the latest response in an email thread instead of the entire body? 

For my scenario, I need to act upon each reply to an email thread with only the content from the latest response.

Thanks!

---

[SRKR]

I just tried some other way and was able to get the Latest Email only. Here are the steps

• Every Email will have a separator which can be either a Line or Multi Tab etc., for Example in Outlook / O365 You will have a line which in HTML refer to this 

<div style="border:none; border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt; padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in">​

• Here is what I did, Step 1

• Initialize Variables which we call the Delimiter, Body of the Message and Latest Response
• Finally we call the split function with [0] which gives us the First Email as below. I use this 

split(variables('EmailBody'),variables('Delimiter'))[0]​

[marcoswnunes]

In my case I've used a different solution.

When I get an email:

 I first convert the email body using "HTML to text" action:

An example of an email converted would be:

Test body email.

Thanks,

Mark

From: Paul <Paul@mycompanyname.com>
Sent: 11 November 2021 15:42
To: Mark <mark@mycompanyname.com
Subject: Subject email test

...

So if I split the output from my conversion above with the word 'From:' and on the same expression I get the first element from my array ([0]) it will result on the latest email. 😀

trim(split(outputs('Convert_Email_BODY_in_TEXT')?['body'],'From:')[0])

Trim() is optional there to remove some extra spaces. 

[Brad_Hedinger]

How would you go about removing from the output, any content that is above the message body, that is automatically put in by the system generating the email? Salesforce does this when emails are received in a Case, and a notification is sent to the team that said email has been received in the Case.  Screenshot example below.  I have highlighted the text to indicate what I only want to extract from the email, regardless of how long or short the highlighted text could be. Of course, blacked out private info. Thank you for the help!  -Brad

[vhs_sri]

Hey @Brad_Hedinger , were you able to figure out a way to remove the unnecessary headers ?

Facing the same issue..

[Brad_Hedinger]

I have not - unfortunately. 😞

[ruthless]

Not all emails have the From e.g. gmail will have something like 

...
Kind Regards

Test User

On Mon, 11 Sept 2023 at 15:55, New User <new@users.net>
wrote:
...

 Im surprised how hard it is to solve something seemingly simple because the email program definitely knows what text is the latest. Might have to throw it into gpt to extract the latest reply

[kudorje]

Hi @ruthless - How did GPT end up doing?

[kudorje]

This will however lead to pre-mature splits because some emails can have the word "From:".

[Brad_Hedinger]

I have not tried gpt yet. Going to run it through the new MS CoPilot first to see if that gets us anywhere. Stay tuned!

[ruthless]

Gpt3.5 let me down, it worked for the most part but struggled with emails where someone sends a single word like Done or Received etc, and depending on the email signature/disclaimer it would sometimes think its a reply.

Gpt4 is working great, it also struggled with one word responses but once i told it to capture even if its a single or few words then it got it correct.

[kudorje]

Makes sense one word answers are typically hard to program or model against due to not having enough bag of words for the model. 

[Brad_Hedinger]

Great! Would you mind please sharing the code the gpt generated for you?

[ruthless]

I only prompted gpt with the emails and it gave an output. Unfortunately there is no reliable way to solve this through code because sooner or later someone will send a email with a structure that wasn’t anticipated.

[kudorje]

Yep, makes sense and this is not programmable.

[elias-pinno]

If you still have the prompt kicking around somewhere, I'd be curious to see it. I've been trying to do this with gpt-3.5 turbo with pretty limited success (at best could get it to mostly pass very simple cases) even trying a lot of different prompts.