Save whole email in the right folder in SP based on the subject/topic or file name (possible)?

[qazx94]

Hello, 

Every year I receive around 1 000 emails with the confirmations from various organizations cooperating with my clients. 

Preconditions: 

- one common shared / group mailbox: confirmation@xxxxx.com

- around 100 clients folders (SharedDocuments >>> Confirmation >>> 100 folders (seperate for each client) 

Expected flow: 

1. Email is send to the "confirmation@xxxxx.com" mailbox. Email containts client name (mentioned in "subject" or/and in body or/and in file name. 

2. Based on the client name (read from the subject/body/file name) the whole email along with attachments is saved in the SharePoint (SharedDocuments >>> Confirmation >>> Client name.      

What I have already done: 

- I watched many tutorials and I' able to save the whole email with the attachments in the location selected by me (below I added print screen from the one of the video that I tested).  

However, I have no idea how to read the name of the customer from the e-mail and save the e-mail in the right place (based on it). Are such things even possible? Can it be done in power automate? Please help 😞 

.

[Keith-Sayer]

Sure can!

It's hard to tell, but in the Folder Path field, you can actually insert partial dynamic content. Here's an example:

What I did was add the folder structure to the top level folder (probably clients or customers, something like that in your case), then added a '/' and then went to add dynamic content and inserted my "From" field.

It works great; but, the trickier part will likely be ensuring you're getting the value from the email exactly as it appears in the folder name. You may have to play around with strings and such to get them to match using "compose" actions.

Worse comes to worse, it will create a folder if there isn't one already there for the string you pass in this step.

[qazx94]

@Keit Thank you for your answer. I appreciate it! 

Unfortunately my knowledge of power automate is poor and I still can't cope. Please find below my flow to save the entire message (with body and attachments). According to your suggestion I tried to play with: /body, subject / attachment name but It doesn't work.
E.g. I tried to use "Subject" to save document in the right folder "/Shared Documents/Confirmation/subject". After saving the flow, I sent an email with the client name in" Subject. I tried all variants (body, subject, attachment name) but with any results. I received an error meassage "It's not possible to create this folder" Do you have any idea what I'm doing wrong? Thanks in advance! 

[Keith-Sayer]

What is the size of the subject, body, etc.? More than likely the name is too long to create a folder with that name.

Is it possible to pull in the email address as a folder name? Just a thought.

[qazx94]

It shouldn't be an issue. I tested this flow by sending a really short email: 

Subject: Microsoft 

Body: Confirmation from Microsoft. 

Attachment name: Microsoft_confirmation. 

Before runing the flow, I created a "Microsoft" folder in the "Confirmation" area. My understaing is that in such a situation a new folder shouldn't be created. The email should be saved in the location that I already created ("Microsoft") because this name appeared in  subject. This makes me not understand why power automate is trying to create a new folder since the required folder already exists.

Also, I can't create a separate email address for each client, because that would mean creating more than 100 mailboxes 😞

It seems to me that the problem may be that the entire expression is taken (eg body along with the footer) while the expression should works as a "contains" to find the client name.

Have you any idea?

[Keith-Sayer]

I think you're on the right track. Here's what I would do.

1. Open up a failed run of your flow in the editor.
2. Go down to the create step.
3. You should be able to see what it was trying to input to throw the error. Something like this:
   
4. More than likely the folder name will be odd (because like you said you are throwing the whole thing in without filtering it at this point).
5. Now, if the folder name isn't right, you'll need to determine how to get the correct one. This is highly dependent on how your emails come in, so I can't really tell you the right answer right away, but I would recommend looking at using substring expressions to find the text you need to find your folder name.

If you find your error and you want me to offer any suggestions, feel free to reply with it. This is kind of the tricky part of Power Automate. We basically have to figure out how to consistently get the data we want from these strings.

[qazx94]

Thank you for still being ready to help me 🙂

Please find the screen: 

Do you have any idea how to save the e-mail in the appropriate folder when the body / subject contains the client's name (currently it have to be equal to it and that's the problem).

[Keith-Sayer · Accepted solution]

Aha, okay, that makes sense. So as you see your flow is trying to make the folder name: 

Re: Microsoft

Colon is not an allowed character for folder names in SharePoint. That's why you are getting the Bad Request error.

Now, to solve this basically we need to isolate "Microsoft" from the subject, right?

Assuming all your emails will be the same format in the subject line of:

Re: [CLIENTNAME]

One way we could solve this is to split the string by the "space" character. To do this, you have to add a couple of preliminary steps to process the data. So before your create file step, insert these steps:

First step:

Here's the expression to use:

split(triggerBody()['text_1'],' ')

Subsitute 'text_1' with your Subject field name

Then do this step:

Don't put anything for initial value.

Next add a "Apply to Each Step" with this expression:

skip(variables('wordsInSubject'),1)

What we are doing here is using each item in our array but skipping the "Re:" one, so it's only the client name, however many words that happens to be.

Within the Apply to Each, add this step:

NOW, when you get to the Create File, put your path like this using the "folderName" variable:

Here's what will happen on multiple word in their name clients:

[qazx94]

Hello Keith, 

Now it works 🙂  Thank you so much for your support!