New Microsoft Flow’s bot features enable lots of possibilities to create automation and notifications with Microsoft Teams. New Flow actions include

  • Post message as a Flow bot to a user or to a channel
  • Post adaptive cards to a user or to a channel
  • Post choice of options to a user

This article demonstrates how you could notify yourself of new emails and process them directly with Microsoft Teams.

#1 Flow Trigger

For triggering the Flow, Office 365 Outlook “When a new email arrives” trigger is used, so it will trigger itself from all incoming emails.

Email trigger

#2 Flow Bot

For creating a Teams notification, “Post a choice of options as the Flow bot to a user” action is used. Actions posts a card with predefined content and custom options as 1-to-1 chat message to a user. User can select one of the options and it’s returned back to the Flow for later processing. On the image below, you can see which email fields are utilized on the bot. I added three choices for email handling, because most of the time I can decide based on sender and subject does the email require my attention.

Flow Bot configuration

Here’s an example what Flow Bot is displaying.

Chat notification

Is Alert -setting adds a notification also to Teams Activity Feed.

Chat topic
Chat message

#3 Handling the Response

Response can be handled with Switch control action. “selectedOption” property includes user selection as text. Marking as read, flagging and deleting an email can be simply done with default Outlook Flow actions.

Afterword

Since this isn’t a real life business scenario, at least not for everyone, this is more of an example of simple, but effective possibilities of Microsoft Flow to improve your daily work-life. For a person like me, who works and communicates with Microsoft Teams, handles personal tasks with Microsoft To-Do and gets just a couple of dozen emails in a week, there might be something useful. I really like a possibility to flag my emails for later processing from directly Teams.

I you want to check more examples how to glue Office 365 service together, here’s couple of my earlier blog articles.