Add Dynamic Content for reply to email address

[Shanescows]

I am trying to automate a solution where I am triggering off an email I get from an automated service. The email is alway From noreply@example.com but the Reply To email address is my customers email address. I want to be able to select Reply To as dynamic content.

[Anonymous]

I think your logic is just off. "Reply" means "respond to the sender of that e-mail", so logically, the person you're replying to is the person who sent that e-mail. It wouldn't make sense for that to be dynamic.

What you probably want to do is send an e-mail and use some dynamic content from your "noreply@example.com" e-mail in the e-mail you will send. Make sense? When you get an e-mail from your customer, you want to send an e-mail to somebody else, not reply to your customer, right?

That's easy to accomplish. You just have to select the correct action for what you want to do. There are a few options, but probably the Outlook "send an e-mail" action will fit your purposes. If you don't want the e-mail to be sent from your e-mail address, you can use the Mail "send an e-mail notification" action instead. Another option I use is Outlook "send an e-mail from a shared inbox" action. If you have a group inbox set up for you in Outlook, you can use that action to send an e-mail from the e-mail address associated with the group inbox using that action. I use that to make my automated e-mails seem official and differentiate them from e-mails I write personally.

Hope that helps.

- Ryan

[Shanescows]

Thank Ryan but that isn't what I am looking for. I will try to explain again. 🙂 

When you go to PowerApps911.com and fill out the contact form it sends an email to our disitrubution list. 

The headers of the email are:

From: noreply@example.com

Repy-To: PersonFillingOutTheForm@example.com 

I have a Flow that when a new email arrives in my inbox from noreply@example.com I want it to send an email with options to PersonFillingOutTheForm@example.com. I use this to say thanks for contacting us and let them self select to be added to our mailing address. I have it all working but it is much harder than it should be.

There is no way with Flow today to gain access to the Reply-To header. So I had to write aterrible string parsing Expression to get the email address out of the body of the email.

I would like the Flow team or Logic Apps team more correctly I am guessing to make Reply-To a valid option for  dynamic content. 

Does that help? 

Thanks

Shane

[Anonymous]

Yes, I now very much get it! Somewhere within the body of your e-mail, there is field which is meant to instruct the recipient of that e-mail (thus far, that's been you, but you'd like a machine to do it instead) to address any replies to a particular e-mail address. From Flow's "perspective", the dynamic content you'd like to pull out is contained within some text (or html, but basically text) within the body of the e-mail message.

I know there's a newly-released e-mail parser connector that could probably accomplish that, although I haven't used it. It's a premium connector unfortunately.

Did you say you solved this with a string parsing expression?

There's a high demand in the Flow community for way to parse information from strings as a workaround to various as-yet unsupported features. As an example (and this is one I gave trying to figure out a week ago), there are many people who want to parse a .csv file using Flow, and are willing to employ tedious and complex workarounds to get it to work, but thus far no one has proposed a solution (that I could find, anyway) that did not involve manually converting the .csv file (to, say, an Excel file with a table).

Would you possibly be willing to share how you parsed out the reply to address from your e-mail?

I bet it only works because the e-mail address starts a predictable number of characters into your standard form e-mail. Still, that's got to be a pretty complicated function, and I'd love to know how you achieved it.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

 You already solved it but you know what I would've suggested to simplify parsing the e-mail address? Altering the output from your online form to place a unique delimiter just before, and a different unique delimiter at the end of the e-mail address - which you could do since you have control over the generation of the automated e-mail in the first place. You could then greatly facilitate parsing the address out by using the search function.

Glad you found a solution and hope you will share!

[Shanescows]

Couple of things.

Reply-To is a standard email header that needs to be added. I talked to someone on the product team and they asked me to post this to make sure it gets considered properly. 🙂 

The email comes from a 3rd party SaaS service so I have no control of it. Wish I did. 

Okay. The part you are more interested in. Fortunately (maybe unfortunately) PowerShell made me learn a lot about string functions. So to disect the email body I have a lot of fun. 🙂 I am going to turn this into a video. I do a lot of them for PowerApps and plan to add flow shortly. 

Here is what the email looks like. 

To start I get lucky and the first part never changes. So to get the name of the sender I create a variable call varNoName that strips out everything up to the persons name like so:

substring(triggerBody()['Body'],669,add(length(triggerBody()['Body']),-669))

Now I need to find the end of their name. I know that the next </li> comes at the end of the name so I use that function to store the usrs name in var1.

substring(variables('varNoName'),0,indexof(variables('varNoName'),'</li>'))

Var1 now equals Shane Young

Later I break the name into first and last by using the space.

Firstname = substring(variables('var1'),0,indexOf(variables('var1'),' '))

Lastname =  

substring(variables('var1'),add(1,indexOf(variables('var1'),' ')),sub(length(variables('var1')),add(1,indexOf(variables('var1'),' '))))

I have done crazier stuff but as you can see text functions work well. You just have to really think about your text and break finding what you need down into baby steps. 

Hope that helps!

PS - I still need Reply-To added as Dyanmic Content. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing! I have split First and Last names before, using almost the same expressions you've come up with. I wouldn't have thought to do that first step, removing everything before the start index I want and storing it in a variable. I'm gonna hold on to that one.

Thanks for the tip!

[jamiemorrison]

Being able to select the email Reply-To header as dynamic content would vastly simplify existing flows I have, as well as improving the robustness of the process.

[lancewicz]

I also vote for this! I have many examples when company send e-mail from dummy email and in field Reply-To they putting customer e-mail address. We need to have this field as dynamic 

[ShadowXVII]

I can't find any connectors with this feature 😞

Tried sending emails using a variety of connectors but none have the Reply-To field available.