Moving Outlook365 messages based on whether or not the sender is in my contacts folder

[Marc_S]

Hi all, I am having problems with a flow that I am hoping someone out there will have ideas about.  While the problem I am having is at one specific point, I am going to give a bit of context as to what I am doing in case people also have ideas about how to do this more efficiently.

Context and purpose of the flow:

I am trying to perform a variety of things to keep an email Inbox very clean.  While much of this can be done with traditional Outlook inbox rules, a few things cannot.  In particular, I want messages from unknown contacts to be moved to a specific folder.  This can be done with Inbox rules, but only locally, so while my computer is off, the rule does not fire.  So I am moving that particular rule to Flow.

How I am using rules vs. Flow:

When an email arrives, I have numerous inbox rules checking for certain domains, subject lines, etc. and moving messages based on that.  If a message moves through all those rules and makes it through them all, the last step is that Outlook moves it into a "Processing" subfolder within my Inbox.  When a new email arrives into that folder, that's when Flow kicks in.

Flow checks the sender email address against my contact list.  If there is a match, then Flow moves that message back into my main Inbox where I will see it.  If there is no match, Flow moves the message into a "filtered external emails" folder, which I just check every couple of days.

Here is a pic of the flow:

What works and what does not:

To start, if I delete the "if no" condition, the flow works and moves messages from known contacts back into my Inbox.  But when I add in the "if no" condition as shown above, the flow does not work.  ALL messages received end up in my "filtered external email" folder, even if the contact exists (even though the "if yes" condition works if that is the only condition I use).  And even though the messages move, Flow give me a failure notice.  Here is what it looks like in Flow on the failure:

Happy to provide more info / answer any questions.  Any magicians out there who can help me figure this out?  Thanks in advance!

[v-yuazh-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @ Marc_S,

Do you want to move the email to folder "Inbox" ,when a new email arrives in folder "Processing", and the email is sent from a email address that is contained in your contact?

And move the email to folder "filtered external emails" ,when a new email arrives in folder "Processing", and the email is sent from a email address that isn't contained in your contact?

You could take a try to modify your flow as screenshot below:

Please let me know if your issue could be solved refer to my workaround.

Regards,
Alice Zhang

[Marc_S · Accepted solution]

So simple and it worked.  Thanks so much!