After Hours Reply Flow not functioning properly

[swelch]

(Sorry if this is really bad, this is my first time working in power apps). I checked other posts that I could find, but most seemed to be from a point where you could access advanced view still.

I built a flow that should theoretically send an after hours message to anyone that emails out shared inbox after hours, but I must have something wrong as there is roughly a 5 minute delay before the message is sent and it also sends the messages out at all times of day. Would someone mind reviewing the flow and pointing me in the right direction?

The flow should check to see if the message was received outside of business hours (8-4:30pm M-F EST) and if it was received outside of those hours, or on a Sat/Sun, it would send an email out letting them know immediately ideally.

The expressions I used were stolen from a different post I found hoping it would work.

"formatDateTime('16:30','HH:mm')" and "formatDateTime('08:00','HH:mm')"

[rebeccas · Accepted solution]

You will get better help in the forum for PowerAutomate but I use both about equal. 

Put a compose in above your condition and the put the "Received Time" (which is what I think you are comparing to) so you can see what it looks like. You can view the run and see it will be something similar to "2021-03-16T20:33:14+00:00". So it won't ever contain Saturday or Sunday. 

You will need to do a little formatting on it to begin with instead of just clicking it from the dynamic content. For example if you want to check for the week day you would use:

dayOfWeek() -- this will give you the day as a number with 1 being Monday

Here is how I would start on that:

I put a compose right below the trigger that is the Received Time and renamed it val_Received then another compose that is dayOfWeek(ouputs('val_Received')) that would give me a 2 for today (because it is Tuesday).

Using compose will help you get everything formatted how you need where you can compare apples to apples. 

[swelch]

Thanks for the reply and guidance. I will use the Automate forum specifically next time!

I did what you recommended with some tweaks. I noticed when I looked at the initial email received output, that the received time was 4 hours ahead of our actual time, so it looks like I will need to convert from UTC to EST. I am hoping I did it correctly and modified everything to accommodate correctly. Mind reviewing?

Edit: small tweak. Renamed "val weekend" to '"val weekday". 

[rebeccas]

That looks correct to me. You can do some of that without the compose in there and by just putting it down in your condition but I often keep it. It is good for trouble shooting and won't slow things down. Looks like you have it figured out now. I am not seeing any obvious issues.

[swelch]

Thank you. Really appreciate the help. Had to add one more compose to remove the date from the converted time. It was using the year as the time instead of the actual time. Was easy enough to fix once I figured out what was happening!

Do you happen to know if there is a way to make it so the flow would only be triggered if the email comes from someone within our tenant? I want to avoid having to add every individual user (and modify the list when a new staff member starts or someone leaves). I can't just include our domain in a check as the email also gets notifications from printer/backup systems that have the same @ address but arent real email addresses.

[rebeccas]

Hmm...I can't think right off on what criteria would catch that. Contains would let you catch internal but that is only thing I can think of right off. 

if(contains(triggerbody()?['From'],'company.com','internal','external') 

But I'm not sure if that will do what you need. You might ask this specific question over in the Flow (PowerAutomate) forum and see if you get a better answer there.

[swelch · Accepted solution]

For anyone that stumbles across this in the future and needs a breakdown:

This flow watches for when you receive an email to a certain shared mailbox, converts the received time to the correct time zone (EST for my org) and uses that conversion to see if the email came in outside of normal business hours (8am-4:30pm M-F for my org). If it detects that it is outside that time, it sends an email out.

Section breakdown:

1. When a new email arrives in a shared mailbox (V2) Operation - Trigger for the flow. 
   1. Original Mailbox Address will be the shared email you are wanting to watch
   2. Folder will most likely be the inbox. Whichever folder within the email you want to watch
2. utc to est - Convert Time Zone Operation - emails (at least on my tenant) seem to come in as UTC instead of our time zone. You can check for yourself by running a test and check the output from the "When a new email arrives" section. If you search for Received you will probably see the time is different than your local time
   
   1. Base time is set to pull the time the email was received
   2. Format String should be sent to the sortable date/time pattern
   3. Source Time Zone: UTC
   4. Destination: Whatever your time zone is
3. val weekday - Compose Operation - further along, the check will need to know what day of the week it was when the email was received. The input provided calculates that and provides a number 0-6 representing the days
   1. Sunday - 0
   2. Saturday - 6
4. Date Removal - Compose Operation - further along, the check will not like the format the time and date are currently in, so the date part needs to be dropped. The input formats it so that only the time is listed
   1. Make sure to capitalize the HH at the end section. HH will be 24-hour time, hh will not.
5. Weekend and Time Check - Or Condition Operation - This is the section doing all the comparing. It checks to see if any of the conditions are met. If NONE of the conditions are met (email arrived between 8am-4:30pm M-F), it will end the flow. If ANY of the conditions are met, it will send the email out.
   
   1. Make sure it is set to an Or function. That way only one of the conditions need to be satisfied
   2. First two are checking the day of the week. They check to see if the day of the week is equal to 0 (Sunday) or 6 (Saturday).
   3. The second two check on the time the email was received. The first checking if the time is after 4:30pm (16:30 24-hour time) and the second checking if the time is before 8:00am (8:00am 24-hour time)
6. Condition Results
   1. If no - Terminate Operation - You'll want to set the flow to terminate and set the status to cancelled to signify it went through the flow and found it did not need to sends the email successfully
   2. If yes - Send an email from a shared mailbox (V2) Operation - This is where you will compose the email to be sent out.
      1. Original Mailbox Address - probably want to make it the same email you are watching, but up to you
      2. To - Set this to From so that the email is sent to the initial sender
      3. Subject and Body - You may want to test a couple rounds with this to get the formatting right. It can be a bit finnicky. 
      4. Advanced Options - Up to you, but I recommend changing the Importance setting from low to Normal.

[BrittanyPretty]

Does not work for me. Says "val weekday" and "date removal" have invalid input parameters. Followed the instructions exactly but does not work at all.

[swelch]

Can you post a screenshot of those two parts? I just checked and mine is still running correctly, so not sure why it wouldnt work for you.