Outlook 365: Get emails: displayed name of the sender

[nintendroid]

The "Get emails" action can get the email address of the sender, but the displayed name seems to get lost. Is it accessible somewhere?

[v-xida-msft]

Hi @nintendroid,

The output of “Get emails” action is an array which doesn't contain Display Name property of the sender. We can get email address of the sender from From property that is email data type. If you want to achieve the sender's display name, please take a try with the following workaround:

1. Add “Office 365 Users”-> “Get user profile” action
2. Set User to a specific email address

The result of running the flow as below:

 More details about “Get emails” action and “Get User profile” action, please read the article as below:

Get emails action

Get User profile

Best regards,

Kris

[Anonymous]

Thanks for providing this work around. However, this will only work for internal O365 users not external email sender's. Do you have any work around to extract the sender display name like outlook does in either flow or powerapps.

[nintendroid]

This is very interesting, but I'm more interested in emails coming from outside my organization.

[MeghanKemp73]

Anyone else worked this out yet for exteranl emails? I am working on this too. 

[CLutka_DCCL]

It took me quite some time to come up with my own solution.

The triggerbody of a new email does not contain the sender's name, only their email address. This lead me to utilizing the Export Email action available from the Office 365 Outlook connector. Once exported, I had the complete email headers in raw format. Then it was a matter of obtaining the indices for "From: " and "To: " keywords from the email headers and then using a substring command to get the name.

If I could figure how to insert an image, I would.  (Edit: I had to be a registered member first before the option was working.) Instead, here are my variable definitions.

FromIndex, Integer, indexOf(body('Export_email'),'From: ')

ToIndex, Integer, indexOf(body('Export_email'),'To: ')

FromLine, String, substring(body('Export_email'),variables('FromIndex'),sub(variables('ToIndex'),variables('FromIndex')))

FromName, String, substring(variables('FromLine'),6,sub(indexOf(variables('FromLine'),'<'),7))

The FromName is the ultimate variable you want. I'm sure you could merge everything together but breaking it up this way is much more readable.

[Anonymous]

That is very clever! Thanks for sharing I will give it a go.

[GaryHounslow]

Thanks very much for this, exactly what I was looking for!

One slight issue, for new emails this works fine, but when a reply to an email comes in it fails at Initialize variable 3 with the below error:

InvalidTemplate. Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Initialize_variable_3' inputs at line '1' and column '2622': 'The template language function 'substring' parameters are out of range: 'start index' and 'length' must be non-negative integers and their sum must be no larger than the length of the string. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#substring for usage details.'.

Any ideas?

Many thanks

Gary

[CLutka_DCCL]

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@GaryHounslow wrote:

One slight issue, for new emails this works fine, but when a reply to an email comes in it fails at Initialize variable 3 with the below error:

Any ideas?

---

Sorry, I'm not maintaining the code. I originally provided the "solution" to fix a one-off problem but am not actively working on that project any longer.

-Chris

[Anonymous]

I had a similar problem.

When MS Flow replied to an external email I wanted to make sure I was using the persons First name "Hi Bob,".

What I ended up doing was creating an address list in Sharepoint that included the persons first name.

If the Flow didn't find the email address info in the SharePoint list I sent an email to myself so that I knew there was a missing email.

This was for a fairly low volume of email addresses that are mostly known to me.

[GabrielStJohn]

Hello, @nintendroid!

 Thank you for posting on the Flow Community Forum! Have you had an opportunity to apply @Anonymous‘s recommendation to adapt your Flow? If yes, and you find that solution to be satisfactory, please go ahead and click “Accept as Solution” so that this thread will be marked for other users to easily identify!

Thank you for being an active member of the Flow Community!

 -Gabriel
Flow Community Manager