Save email attachments to a specific folder using Power Automate Desktop

[Ranjini]

Save email attachments to a specific folder using Power Automate Desktop.

Power Automate Desktop

Power Automate is an application within the Microsoft Office 365 Suite designed to automate manual workflows by literally connecting our apps and common tasks together.

Power Automate is a cloud-based solution that helps users to automate activities and operations to save ample time and effort on tedious manual tasks. You can use the platform to automate workflows between your applications and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data and much more.

Introduction

This applies to regular emails with attachments that you would like Power Automate to automatically save the attachment(s) to a specific folder. The dynamically chosen path is based on the Subject Line of the email received. This can be achieved relatively easy and would save you a lot of routine administration time.

I get plenty of emails with attachments to them. I want them to save automatically to my folder instead of clicking on them, save to, or drag and drop them onto my desktop in order to print them, or anything like that. I want them just to – as soon as I get an email, I want it just to feed into my folder.

To build this workflow you need

• Power Automate Desktop.
• Folder to save the attachment:

I had created two folders in E drive ‘hardware invoice’ and ‘software invoice’ in order to save attachments.

• An email Account (Outlook):

Here I have four unread emails all with attachments present in them. I am saving these attachments based on the subject of the email received.

In our four emails received two are related to hardware, one is related to software and the last one is something related to mobile. Our aim is to save the hardware-related attachment in the 'hardware invoice’ folder and the software-related attachment in the ‘invoice’ folder.

We are going to achieve this by directing our flow as if the email subject contains the word hardware the attachment present will be saved in the directed folder and the same for software. And the email neither has hardware nor software should remain unread.

Our flow

Our first step is to launch outlook and the instance created will be stored in a variable.

The entire success of our flow lies in the next step. ‘Retrieve email messages from outlook’.

In this step we are giving the name of the account to work with, the name of the folder to retrieve messages from (inbox, send items), next we are specifying whether to retrieve all messages in the folder or only the unread ones or from reading mails.

If you want to be quite specific about the sender or the recipient of the email you can specify it next to ‘from contains and to contains’ respectively. Here our aim is to filter the emails with respect to the subject, so specify the key phrase to find within the email subject in ‘subject contains’. Here we filter the email subject using the word ‘hardware’. The last two steps help to save the attachment in the desired folder.

Same processes are repeated to save email attachments which contain software in its subject line.

Finally close the outlook.

Let us run the flow and check the Output

Below given images are showing that our attachments are saved in the folder specified.

Conclusion

We had successfully executed our flow using POWER AUTOMATE DESKTOP. From this BOT now that you know how to save attachments present in our mail concerning the subject line, from address, to address and key phrase present in the body of our email.

I hope you found this blog helpful. Please provide feedback in the comment section.