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

[abm]

Hi @Anonymous 

You could use Get emails (V3) and set Fetch only unread message to No.

Then add a For Each Loop to iterate the results. Inside the loop add an IF condition to check whether IsRead property is true or false?

What I am not sure is how many records this will return?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365/#known-issues-and-limitations

Thanks

[v-alzhan-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Sorry for there is no any way to achieve the requirement since there is a limitation of 25 for the "Get emails" action and there is no any alternative ways for the issue.

Best regards,

Alice       

Community Support Team _ Alice Zhang
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

thank you both for taking your time and looking into this. It is unfortunate but I will have to look for another way to achieve my goal.

Best regards,

Sebastian

[AKRogers]

Hey @Anonymous! I know you've already marked this with a solution, but I do have one idea.  It's a workaround, but it may help.  

What if you create a SharePoint list with one item per mailbox you're monitoring, and create a column called "unread count"?  When an email comes in you could increment that number.  This is a bit hacky, so you'd probably need to manually clear out that number once those mailboxes are checked and the emails are read, or have a flow you can manually start to do the same thing.

Again, hacky, but you'd be able to surface that "unread count" number right in a Teams tab for visibility.  

Good luck!!

Ashley

[fehann]

Hello, hope I am not too late. The workaround I found is if you can mark all you emails as unread before you run the flow, you are able to retrieving all of them by unmarking them as you are getting the emails. The flow will continue running until there are no more unread emails, this is accomplished by creating the variable, updating it at each iteration and unmarking as read the emails you already got, the Do until action will stop when length(variable) reaches zero.

[AlanBourke]

This 25 item limit is crazy. Way to decimate the possible use cases for this type of flow.

[DeeTronSEAM]

Shoutout to @fehann !!!

I used your suggestion to mark as Unread all the email messages I wanted to process (I'm turning hundreds of emails in a user's mailbox into PDFs), and then loop through them in batches of 25 as you described.

Thanks for sharing.  Saved me so much pain.

[fehann]

@DeeTronSEAM Glad to hear that it worked well! 😅👏👏

[Sam-]

I respectfully disagree that this cannot be done as I have just done it!

I tackled it by repeatedly doing searches for unread emails in my inbox from [dawn-of-time] until [now], iterating over the top 25, replacing [now] with the earliest of the dates in the 25 emails and doing another search. With each search I increment a total of the email count. I stop doing searches when there are zero results, then output the total to Excel.

The steps are as follows in pseudocode:

Recurrence trigger to start it off
Initialize CheckedUntil variable
Initialize ResultsReturned variable = 1
Initialize ResultsTotal variable = 0
Do until ResultsReturned = 0
{
Get emails v3: folder inbox, fetch only unread=yes, search query=received:2000-01-01..formatDateTime(variables('CheckedUntil'), 'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss')
Set ResultsReturned variable = length(body('Get_emails_(V3)')?['value'])
Increment ResultsTotal variable by ResultsReturned
Apply to each value from Get_emails_(V3)
  {
  if Get_emails_(V3)Receiveddatetime is less than CheckedUntil
    {
     set CheckedUntil variable = Get_emails_(V3)Receiveddatetime
    }
  }
}
Add row into Excel table including ResultsTotal (or whatever else you want to do with ResultsTotal)

[DeeTronSEAM]

FWIW, I gave up on the Get Mails (v3) action and am now using the HTTP with Azure AD connector and its Invoke an HTTP request to call the Microsoft Graph "List Messages" endpoint/function.  Yes, it is a Premium connector, but at this point in MSFT's licensing ever-changing attitude, it's getting **bleep** (really, we're censoring the word D@mN ?) near impossible to avoid Premium or 3rd-party connectors to get anything of substance done.  But I digress...

This method gives you granular control over which search criteria you want to specify, which fields you want returned, and full access to as many messages as you desire (using the paging function for resultsets greater than 100 messages).

Resources:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/webcontents/

Overview of Microsoft Graph - Microsoft Graph | Microsoft Docs

List messages - Microsoft Graph v1.0 | Microsoft Docs

[Anonymous]

The work around I found - and in my opinion better that converting the messages into unread messages because while converting your messages into unread you can accidently lose track of messages that are actually unread - is having two folders In and Out. In the 'In' folder have all the messages you want to retrieve for extracting attachments of for whatever reason. The 'Out' folder should ideally be empty. Extract 25 emails at a time from the In Folder and move them to the Out Folder. Do this process until the 'In' folder is empty.

You can easily move multiple emails into a folder by select multiple emails while pressing the Shift Key and Ctrl Key, and using the Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V commands.

[S4m33r]

You're a star!! A year later and...well... your post has helped me overcome the same frustrating issue others have experienced. Your method was the solution to my problem. It took at least few hours to digest the documentation, trial and errors to master the HTTP request as I'm new to Power Automate.

My case scenario:
- Automation set to run every hour

- Access a shared mailbox, extract all emails (Bypass 25 results limitation which required anger management) within the Inbox folder where subject line contains "MO/"

- JSON output to only return ReceivedDateTime and Subject line

- Save file as JSON

FME (My everyday ETL tool from Safe) then takes over and processes the JSON file further down the line so "attributes" can be extracted and "other stuff".

FME result - Just 2 columns which can be uploaded to SP as XLSX or processed further.

Again thanks to you and the OP for raising this issue in the first instance.

PS: I now need to understand how to schedule this workflow to run:
- Every hour / Mon to Fri / From 08:00 to 17:00

Cheers

[VictorIvanidze]

Hi @S4m33r 

>PS: I now need to understand how to schedule this workflow to run:
>- Every hour / Mon to Fri / From 08:00 to 17:00

You can create a recurrent appointment in your calendar as shown here: https://www.ivasoft.com/delayoutofhoursemails.shtml

Your flow should check if current time is working time or not.

[S4m33r]

Hi @VictorIvanidze 

Thanks for your input however I'm confused about this implementation.
All I want is to define the recurrence of this workflow which means that the trigger should provide this options similar to Task Manager or any other scheduling service.
Why using Outlook?

Cheers

[VictorIvanidze]

I've recommended Outlook as it provides maximum flexibility. You can define your working hours 9:00-16:00 each Monday and 12:00-20:00 each Friday, for example. I know it's a bit too much for your task 😉

[S4m33r]

Yes I see. Nevertheless it's good know as I'm still new to using this platform.

Just looking for a simple solution.

Thanks 😎

[DeeTronSEAM]

I'm intrigued by the Outlook calendaring idea from @VictorIvanidze because I'm not satisfied my solution is ideal....but here is how I deal with irregular re-occurances, @S4m33r  ....

For example, I have a flow that I need to run only once per month (the 21st of the month) at a specific time (8:08AM MT), sooooooo... 

I have my flow trigger as a daily reoccurrence set to run at 8:08 AM MT.

Then I set the trigger's Trigger Condition to a "fine-tuning" formula.

(btw, access the Trigger Condition setting from the ellipses menu's Settings entry...e.g.

)

Trigger Condition formula example to allow the flow to only trigger on the 21st day of the month:

@contains(createArray(21), int(convertFromUtc(utcNow(), 'Mountain Standard Time', '%d')))

 By expanding the values in the array and using different base reoccurrence trigger types (e.g. hourly v. daily) you can (crudely) tune the pattern to your needs.  For example, I have another flow that deals with operations tied to business hours across locations in different timezones.  That one uses an hourly re-occurance and the array has the shift-change hours (e.g. 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19) with the formula looking at the hour portion of the current datetime.

Also, be aware that when you use Trigger Conditions you will NOT see any entries in the Flow's run history for the times when the trigger condition was false and the flow was prevented from triggering.  This is by design as it prevents you from having to pay for those runs as they technically are not runs as the flow never triggered.  Clear as mud?  Good luck! 

[voromahery]

Hi sam,

I know we are 2 years after but can you explain how you implément this pseudocode in Power automate please?

Thank you for your help

[Sam- · Accepted solution]

No problem - I'm not sure if there's a better way of sharing this, but here's a mega-screenshot of the whole thing...