How to create an RPA flow using Outlook Email activities

Overview

You need to create a basic flow using some of the Outlook automation activities to read mail and store attachments.

We will build an RPA flow which first reads emails from an outlook account. Then for each email, the email text body will be written into the .txt file including the attachments one by one.

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Tutorial

Difficulty: Medium
Estimated completion time: 25 Minutes

1 – Open RPA Studio on your machine. If you are not signed in already into the tenant, you will be asked to sign in before proceeding to RPA flow designer screens.

2 – On the Home page of RPA Studio click Create New Project and specify the following properties in the pop-up window:

(a) Name: OutlookMails

(b) ProjectLocation: <default>

(c) Description: Read Outlook Mails.

(d) Language: VB <selected by default>

3 – Let’s first focus on reading the mails from Outlook account. For that we need to add the Get Outlook E-mails activity to the flow and specify the following properties:

• Account – which is the email address from which the email is read. Specify the argument:
  • mailaccount of type string and default value for your email account
• Mail Folder – the exact email folder within selected account. Specify the argument:
  • mailfolder of type string and default value for your email account
• Optional: Filter – use this property to filter the emails which should be read
  • e.g. “[Subject] = Test”
  • Note: more examples of the filters can be found in the Infor RPA user guide.
• Mark As Read – check if you don’t wish to read the same email
• Only unread mails – only unread email would be read it is an explicit filter. Please check this checkbox
• Top Number of email which should be read in one go – it is an integer value e.g. 2  
• For Output property Emails we need to create the variables
  • called emaillist which will store the list of mails of type List <Mail>
    • To find List <Mail> data type, expand the Variable Type and select Browse for type. In the Type Name cell type List and select List under the System.Collection.Generic domain. Once selected, below the System.Collection.Generic.List from the dropdown select Browse for type and in the new dialog window in the Type Name cell type Mail and select Mail under Infor.Activities.Email.

4 – Now let’s start reading the mails one by one. For that let’s look for an automation activity called For each and define

• for Type property as Mail which is same as a single object type from the emaillist variable
• for Values property define emaillist.
• In the ForEach activity on Design Canvas, you will see the following text “Foreach item in emaillist” the item signifies the single object in this example mail within the list of objects (in this example being list of mails).

5 – Add the Sequence activity to specify the flow for reading each mail body and writing to the file. For adding a flow inside the ForEach activity we always need a Sequence activity.

6 – Within the Sequence add activity Assign which will allow us to assign the mail body to a variable of type string. On the Properties panel:

• For To property – create a variable called body of type string – in this variable we will store the text of the mail body
• For Value property – here specify the VB expression for transforming the read mail body into a string data type by typing: item.body.tostring

7 – Next add Append Line activity which will allow RPA flow to write the mail body into a .txt file. To specify its properties:

• For Line property – input the variable storing the body of the mail which in this case body.
• For Source Filepath property – it should be the path of the .txt file where we will write the mail body e.g. “C://RPA/rpa.txt” or you can create a variable called filepath of type string with default values

8 – In addition you can also specify the activity to download the attachments if any were sent by adding Download Outlook Attachment activity and specify the following input and output properties:

• For input Email property specify Item as in For Each activity
• For input Path which is the directory path where the attachment should be stored, create variable:
  • called attachementpath of type string and default value “C:\RPA”
• For output File Paths property create a variable
  • called attachemenfilepath of type List <String>
    • To find List <String> data type, expand the Variable Type and select Browse for type. In the Type name cell type List and select List under the System.Collection.Generic domain. Once selected, below the System.Collection.Generic.List from the dropdown select the String and click ok.

Now we can run this flow to see if all if working as expected. In case of any errors check the Output panel to see where the error may have occurred.

Activity List