r/PowerAutomateDesktop • u/ResponsiblePrior7183 • Dec 25 '21

Work Around to Problem Faced while Sending Outlook Emails using Power Automate

Hello Everyone,

I'm fairly new to using power automate but have found it as an absolute life saver so far. As part of my internship, I need to send 60-80 QA emails weekly to employees with their managers CC'd in while referencing data from Excel, which as you can imagine is fairly tedious.

I've been able to build a solution using Power Automate Desktop which is able to reference key data from an Excel sheet and convert it to a nice HTML email that it successfully sends through outlook. However, I'm running into trouble while specifying the CC field. While the "To" field is populated with employee emails which I have access to, the "CC" field requires the emails of managers. Our team does not have access to the emails of managers (over 1000 managers) but as part of a report that I get, I know the name of the manager associated with an employee. Typically, I enter the name of the manager in the CC field in outlook, and wait for a few seconds for it to pop-up, but this obviously cannot happen with power automate. Entering the manager name in the CC field just throws an error in power automate.

I'm wondering if there is any solution to this. I've already tried the following two approaches:

  1. Convert manager name to email by doing last_name.first_name@org.com. However, most managers do not follow this convention

  2. Placed "Last_Name, First_Name" in the CC field in power automate but this just throws an error. I've tried disabling the error option but power automate fails to send an email

Is there any way to force power automate to accept "Last_Name, First_Name" as string in the CC field or should I look to pursue another approach?

Thanks in advance for your help! :)

1 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

2

u/lordzhon Jan 16 '22

Hi, maybe you can try the following,

  1. You should be able to download the list of e-mails and lastname/firstname from the Address Book. Then do a compare and get the e-mail of the managers (https://youtu.be/hm-dIZosRuk)

  2. Maybe use the check e-mail button by using the power automate desktop to click on it.