Adding a CC and Attachment to Outboxed emails using Power Automate

[Anonymous]

Dear Community, 

I'm working for an events company based in London and we send out a lot of mail-merged documents to our clients and delegates like e.g. invitation letters to an event etc. I have recently been getting into exploring Power Automate (which I think is a great app) and have used it to speed up some of our administration processes. 

A new challenge has been suggested by one of our colleagues asking whether Power Automate can assist with bulk emails in the following scenario: 

We have mail-merged 100 documents that are now in our outlook outbox, ready to send, as we have selected the option to 'work offline'. Before sending though, we are being asked to CC someone and add the same file to every email in our outbox. What Power Automate would have to do here is essentially to access our outlook outbox and add the same CC and PDF file to every email. How would you go about and do that? 

If anyone knows how to do this or is happy to take on a challenge, I'd be so grateful as this would help our company so much! 

Many thanks and best regards,

-Calvin

[Ankesh_49]

@Anonymous  Could you please try below, or correct my understanding wrt your requirement.

[VJR]

A macro will give you more maneuverability. 

I have 1 email in the Outbox folder.

It opens up on the left hand side while I execute the macro.

Adds the Cc

Inserts the attachment

You can use .Send to send it 

Excel Macro:

Sub EditOutboxEmail()

         
      Set myApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
      Set NS = myApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
        
      
      Set OutboxFolder = NS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderOutbox)

      Dim CurrentItem As Object
            
      For Each CurrentItem In OutboxFolder.Items

            CurrentItem.Display
            CurrentItem.CC = "abcd@email.com"
            CurrentItem.Attachments.Add "C:\temp\xxx, xxx.txt"
            
      Next CurrentItem

 End Sub

- Add the macro to the Excel file 

- Call it from the PAD Run Macro action

- You can add/modify code as required 

[Anonymous]

Hey Ankesh, 

Thank you for taking your time to do this!

I think the Power Automate script could work, if there is a way of sending it to multiple recipients. I believe in your example, when you are sending the outlook email, it only gets sent to one person but I'd need it to go out to multiple different emails, basically only adding CC and attachment to all existing emails in the outbox. 

Do you think there is a way of adjusting that? 

[Anonymous]

Hey VJR, 

Many thanks for replying to my question so fast!

The macro is a great idea, however, the reason why we brought Power Automate into play is because we are trying to avoid the use of macros to make the system as user-friendly as possible as most admins who are not familiar with understanding computer language like using macros will not use it in the end and do it manually like in the beginning, even though we could save a lot of time if we created a user-friendly and easy to understand way of doing this. 

Do you know a way of doing it through Power Automate by any chance? That would be fantastic!

[VJR]

Hi @Anonymous 

With the quick check I made it doesn't seem that there is any action in PAD that modifies/edits an existing email and adds a CC or an attachment.

I tried to modify the Cc row of the RetrievedEmails datatable but it didnt allow. Maybe someone finds a way. 🤞

Another option would be to write a similar code in .vbs file and use the PAD action of Run Vbscript but again this involves the same coding.

[Anonymous]

Hi @VJR 

No problem at all. I think @Ankesh_49 script in PAD looked very good. If we can find a solution in terms of the 'send' action to be able to send to the original users then that would do it! 

Thanks for your help and hoping you enjoy the rest of your week! 

-Calvin

[Ankesh_49]

If we bring excel into the mix, which will contain all e-mail ids. Then we can loop it and send it in bulk. Would that help?

[Anonymous]

Hey, thanks for your speedy reply! Yes we can happily bring excel into the mix for sure, no problem. Only thing we'd need to make sure is that each email goes to the right recipient as their names will be mail-merged and will say 'Dear First Name, Last Name' in the email.

But overall, if we can do that, I think that would have a very high chance of functioning!

Do you think that would be possible? 

Many thanks

-Calvin