Two triggers in same flow

[PhillipR12]

Hi, I am very new to this. I downloaded a template down that I need to use for work in Power apps.
In the template it looks to me like there are two triggers next to each other, but as far as I understand that should not be possible. What I am essentially trying to build is a flow that automatically detects when an email with a specific subject has been sent. Then wait for 7 days and check if there has been a reply. If there has not been a reply, then I want an automated message saying that the email has not been answered. The flow I have been looking at and I am trying to copy this to my power app: https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-US/templates/details/2b5075ef950548339116c00149b7d6f4/remind-...

I don't understand how there is two triggers in the same flow, but it might just be me being confused.

Please advise.

[grantjenkins]

You can have multiple triggers, but there needs to be a single trigger that initially kicks off the flow. In this case the main trigger fires when you send an email, and then waits for the second trigger - until an email arrives (which you would need to use a trigger condition on in this case, so it only fires in a certain case).

For your scenario, how will you check if there has been a reply? And do you want to wait for the full 7 days to check on the reply or keep checking periodically up until 7 days.

[Pstork1]

In general its not a good idea to have a flow with two triggers.  In this particular case the two triggers work because of the way they are configured. But the template itself has some issues that need to be fixed to get it to work the way it should.  Here's the basic logic as it is today.

1) You send an email out high importance. This trigger fires for every high importance email you send.

2) The second trigger is a batch trigger.  It fires for every email received in your inbox.  As a batch trigger it will just wait and accumulate emails until it times out. The default timeout set on the trigger is 4 hours.

3) At the end of 4 hours it will take all the emails sent in the last 4 hours and look at the subject line. If the subject line of original high importance email contained "response" then it will send a notification.  It doesn't check any of the emails received for a match. 

So if you send out an email at high importance with the word "response" in the subject and you get any emails in your inbox within 4 hours you will be sent the prompt.

Problems I see

1) It will send a notification after 4 hours whether you have received an actual response or not because it never checks anything about the responses. It just reminds you that you wanted a response.

2) The second trigger monitors every email that comes in, so extending the timeout beyond a relatively short 4 hours is going to lead to a massive amount of data being tracked.

I don't see any way to easily modify it to get it to do what was originally intended.  Its a bad design and its broken.  Instead I would setup two flows.  One would trigger when I send an email with high importance.  It would store subject, the To line, and the date in a data source. Then a second recurrence flow would trigger on a schedule. It would compare what is in the data source with all the email in the mailbox.   If the current date is beyond the reply date and no response with that subject from that person is found then send the notification and delete that line from the data source.  

[grantjenkins]

@Pstork1 Good to know - I didn't realize that second trigger would batch the emails over the 4 hours.

[PhillipR12]

Very good answer. I am new to this, so is there a guide you can link me to, that would help me through this process?
Thank you in advance.

[Pstork1]

It will fire as soon as the first email is received.  But since there is no Split On setting in the settings it will continue to wait for emails until it times out after 4 hours. The timeout is also set in the settings of that trigger.

[PhillipR12]

I am unsure how to proceed with having two different flows and how they communicate.

[Pstork1]

The two flows don't actually communicate with each other.  The first flow, that triggers when you send a high importance email, stores information about the email in a data source.  That's essentially a list of the emails you want replies to.

The second flow runs periodically, lets say once a day, and gets all the emails received that day.  It then compares them to the list in the data source.  If a reply to an item in the list is found it will be removed from the list. When done the list will be filtered to see which items are still there that are now overdue (more than 7 days old in your case). A notification will be sent for those and they will also be removed from the list.  The only ones remaining in the data source are the ones that aren't overdue and haven't recieved replies. The list will be checked again tomorrow.