Get emails (V3) - count unread / bypass 25 limit

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I tried to do this myself but I cannot find any solution on the internet.

I have the following situation:

I want to monitor the actual number of unread e-mails of multiple inboxes. The total number from each user can be pushed to a Teams channel or updated inside a share point Excel file, but that is not my problem. The users usually have more than 25 unread so I have a problem with the "Get emails" limitation of 25.

I was thinking if there maybe is some function that I couldn't find that will just "read" the total number of unread mails in the inbox and provide this number.

If that is not possible my idea would be to create a flow which will "count" the individual message IDs of all unread mails in the inbox. But I don't know how to make a flow which will execute this action.

If you think there is a way to do it - please share it with me. Your help is very much appreciated.

@AKRogers I saw a different thread where you were working with message IDs in a somewhat related case, maybe you can help? 🙂

Thanks in advance,

Seba

[leoU]

Thank you Sam, your codes work like a charm.....

[leoU]

Thank you Sam, this works for me!

[leoU]

This is not true, please check @Sam-  codes for solution!

[jazzen17]

Hi,

Can someone help me also? i am creating a flow that retrieves all the attachment from a certain email and delete it after i retrieved it. But it has the 25 only limit, is there a workaround on it? Thanks!

[leoU]

Use @Sam-  code; it works. 

[aya1fouad]

Can you show the complete flow? it seems like some inner data is missing @fehann 

[MarcDELMOTTE]

I had the same problem when exporting 5000 emails to Access for big data analysis.
1. Ask to see all emails ("Click here to see more Ms Exchange items" - translated from french)
2. Ctrl+A to select all emails
3. Fix the selection with Copy Ctrl+C
4. Open the Import-Export Wizard and select Export to File (PST)
5. When done, File-Open this file in your Outlook
You can now do whatever you want, even import it into an Access table...
Marc - C.I.A. Informatique (Belgium)

[S4m33r]

@MarcDELMOTTE 
Bonjour Marc

You posted your reply in the wrong section I believe.
This is/was about automating a task.

Thanks

[ichambon]

Hey @fehann,

Just wanted to drop a quick message to say thanks for your post that helped me save a bunch of time storing email attachments from a year ago on OneDrive. Your idea was a real lifesaver!

If you don't mind, I wanted to share a couple of comments that might help other folks out in the future.

First off, the DO UNTIL Action expression isn't visible in the screenshot you posted, but it can be constructed using the Expression builder with the syntax:

length(variables('ListEmails'))

Secondly, even if you try to avoid the TOP 25 emails, the GET EMAILS (V3) Action has a limit of 250 emails, as noted on the support page:

"Please note that filtering related to these fields: To, Cc, To Or Cc, From, Importance, Fetch Only With Attachments, Subject Filter, is performed using first 250 items in a given mail folder. To avoid that limitation you can use 'Search Query' field."

To get around this limit, you can use the "search" property in the SEARCH QUERY field. An example of an expression that worked for my search criteria was:

(from:email_1@email.com OR from:email_2@email.com) AND subject:Sales AND hasAttachment:true AND isRead:false AND received>=@{formatDateTime(addDays(utcNow(),-365),'yyyy-MM-dd')} AND received<=@{formatDateTime(utcNow(),'yyyy-MM-dd')}

the @{formatDateTime(addDays(utcNow(),-365),'yyyy-MM-dd')} parts can be written using the Expression builder

Thanks again for the great post!

[testing_testing]

Hi there, 

Sorry for replying a a message 2 years later but could you please provide some details on how you've done that in power automate? Any screenshots? I understand the idea of using Graph API to request unread emails but I am not sure how to implement that.

[DeeTronSEAM]

Hi @testing_testing ,

I'll try to help but I'm not quite what part of the process you're interested in.  I have attached a big-A$$ed screenshot of my solution's flow that contains the mailbox GetMessages looping to extract the info for all emails in a mailbox folder.  Be aware that a mailbox contains the inbox folder and many more folders (e.g. Trash) and possibly sub-folders.  Thus, because my flow is dealing with which mailbox folder to target and extracting it and possibly all its subfolder(s)'s emails, it makes this a bit overwhelming if you're just trying to focus on a sub part.  So, why don't you look over the flow screenshot and then provide some questions detailing the specific area/functionality you are interested in?

Just for context, this flow is launched by an HTTP request which provides some parameters used to alter the flow behavior (e.g. which employee's mailbox to target, which folder in that mailbox to target).  For dev, I suggest you skip that and just set the variables directly....but in the screenshot you'll see my vars are getting set by referencing the http trigger parameters.  So I wanted to warn you about that possible puzzling thing.  Anyway....the flow then focuses on zeroing in on the targeted emails and looping through all of them by "chunking" the getEmails requests/responses into "batches" until it has chewed through them all.

The goal being to extract properties for each email which are used to:

1) record the data in a SQL database (for outside auditing/logging/data-analysis)

2) to invoke a child flow that generates and outputs a PDF of each email along with the contents of any ("PDF-able") attachments on that email.

I have not expanded those scopes to try and keep this manageable for the discussion here.

The main thing to note in the expanded area is all the nested looping and number calcs as the flow tries to determine how many messages it retrieved with the response from the GraphAPI endpoint, if there are more emails still to retrieve (aka another page/chunk of messages), and if the number processed so far meets the run-limits set by the invocation parameters.

Hope this helps.  It can be daunting at first but once you master using the GraphAPI, it's almost like having super-powers compared to the built-in "no-code/low-code/citizen develop" connectors/actions.  Good luck!

Oh, keep in mind that permissions to the mailbox must be properly configured to allow this access to work.  As one would expect, you can't just start reading people's mailboxes if they or an Exchange or Azure admin hasn't properly configured access.  If you don't have "sway" over or direct control of such areas/people, you may be unable make this viable for anything beyond your own mailbox.  A work around (or for testing purposes) is to have a user or admin extract a mailbox as a PST file and then import that PST into a mailbox you have access to into a new subfolder in your inbox.  I suggest starting with that before getting into the technical and political "challenges" of security configuration of other employees' mailboxes.

[AJD_MT]

@Sam- : I try to follow your documentation and fail.

Initial situation:
I have a folder for each company in my email database and manually sort relevant emails into the respective folders.
For example, I sort emails sent to Microsoft and emails received from Microsoft in the "MICROSOFT.COM" folder. I have several hundred of these folders.
I move less relevant emails to an "Archive" folder. I have accumulated ~40,000 e-mails there. Now I would like to sort these emails automatically, if possible.

Here I have the following challenges:

1. power automate desktop is extremely cumbersome and also not "cloud first".
2. power automate cloud
   1. i can't seem to enter "*@microsoft.com" as the sender or recipient in the "Get emails (V3)" action.
   2. i fail at the 25 email limit
   3. i do not manage to implement your documentation.

[VictorIvanidze]

Try to switch to the "old" flow editor.

Also have a look at this: https://ivasoft.com/countemailsflow.shtml