How To Send Emails With Power Automate [ Many Examples ]

Understand how to send an email with Power Automate. This article explains how to setup your mail action and discusses common questions.

Note this article discusses only sending emails with the Outlook actions, since this is the most common way to send emails with Power Automate.

Nevertheless it should be mentioned, that there are actions for sending emails via any SMTP server or for GMail.

Power Automate Send Email

Within this chapter you get to know every single option you can use to modify your email to your needs.

Use this as a reference or as guide to get an overview on sending emails with ‘Send an email (V2)’ action.

Please always use the ‘Send an email (V2)‘ version, since previous versions are deprecated.

Note: Many of the settings that are described below, are under the advanced options. Please click on ‘Show advanced options’ to see these advanced settings.

Sender

The sender of your email is per default the user of the connection you’ve provided. To find out who is the default sender, click on the three dots and take a look under the checked option under ‘My connections’ (like shown in the picture below).

To overwrite the default sender, set ‘From (Send as)’.

From (Send as)

By setting the From (Send as) you can define who should be the sender of the email.

Since sending emails as another user can be misused, the field’s text when it is empty already indicates that you have to assign a permission to send an email from another account.

Since the size of the ‘From (Send as)’ text field is limited, here you see the full text:

Email address to send mail from (requires “Send as” or “Send on behalf of” permission for that mailbox). For more info on granting permissions please refer https://docs.microsoft.com/office365/admin/manage/send-email-as-distribution-list

In case you want to send an email as someone else, please assign the permission upfront.

Recipients

As you know from writing emails, there are three types of recipients an email can have: The original receiver defined under To, reader in carbon copy under CC and blind copy recipients under BCC.

We’ll explain how to set each one of these below.

To

You need at least one To recipient for your email. This field is mandatory.

CC

To send a carbon copy to someone, just set the CC option.

BCC

To send a blind copy to someone, just set the BCC option. This way the other recipients can’t see, that the person(s) under BCC recieve a copy of the email.

Email to multiple recipients

If you need to address more than one recipient, you can do so by placing a semicolon between every email address. As the text for the empty To field already indicates:

The complete text is:

Specify email addresses separated by semicolons like [email protected]

To send an email to multiple recipients simple places semicolons after every entry like shown below.

[email protected];[email protected];[email protected]

Note: The example shows the To field, but this works for CC and BCC as well.

Reply To

You might want to modify the reply to email address. The address which is used when you click on the reply button of your email client.

The most common scenario for changing the reply to address, is to set it to a No Reply email address. This way you underline, that you do not want to receive emails and that there are not read.

You can easily modify the Reply To address by setting the Reply To address.

Importance

The priority of an email can be set under Importance. (See the example below.)

In case you do not set the importance, the default value will be Low.

In my opinion, this is a bad choice for the default, because by default your emails will look like this:

I would prefer to set the default to Normal. Then no message about the importance of the email would appear.

Anyway, be aware that the default is Low Importance and you need to change it in the advanced settings in case want something else.

Sensitivity

To be honest, I have no real experience with Sensitivity labels.

To my understanding you can configure sensitivity labels and apply them for instance on documents and emails.

Based on a label you can encrypt emails, prohibit email forwarding or downloading attachments.

But as mentioned, I have never tried it myself. Follow the link to read more.

Subject

To set the title of your email use the subject field. This field is mandatory.

Body

You can use the rich text editor to create your email message. Note: Body field is mandatory.

The rich text editor will generate HTML in the background. As an alternative you can directly edit the HTML by clicking on the tag symbol ‘</>’.

The Power Automate Send an email (V2) action will always send an HTML email. I believe there is no way to send a plain text email with this action.

Send email with an HTML table

You can always write your own HTML and of course you can also write your own HTML table. But when comes to HTML tables, we can simply make use of the ‘Create HTML table’ action.

See the example below:

1. Add a ‘Initialize variable’ action to your flow
2. Configure the action to be an array and provide some sample data
3. Add a ‘Create HTML table’ action to your flow
4. Use your initialized array variable as data source under From
5. Leave Columns on ‘Automatic’
6. Add a ‘Send an email (V2)’ action to your flow
7. Set To, Subject and use the output of ‘Create HTML table’ in your body

Send email with embedded image

Sometimes you want to embed an image into the content of your mail and not attach it.

To send email with image in body you need to use the HTML img tag.

There are two ways to use the img tag to inline the image:

1. Reference the image from a public server (see example below)
2. Embed the base64 content of the image into the HTML

I will only focus on option 1. Option 2 has the disadvantage, that not all mail clients will display the image. For instance GMail won’t display these images.

Option 1 is the save route to go.

So here is an example of what you can do:

<p>Nice logo:</p>
<img src="https://zeitgeistcode.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/zeitgeistcode-logo-1.svg" alt="zeitgeistcode logo" width="990" height="225">

Send email HTML button

Displaying a clickable button within an email is quite complicated. There are many email clients. Unfortunately they do not interpret your HTML code the same way. A button looking good in GMail might look awful in Outlook.

I’ve played around with the options discussed in the article “How to Create Beautiful Bulletproof Email Buttons That Absolutely Work“. I found a solution that works for me. I’ve tested Outlook (Client & Web), Gmail and Apple Mail on an iPhone.

<br/> <br/>
<style>  a:visited {
    color: #ffffff;
}  </style>
<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
    <tbody>
    <tr>
        <td>
            <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding=" 0">
                <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td bgcolor="#1f4372" style="border-radius: 4px">
                        <a class="maillink" href="https://zeitgeistcode.com" target="_blank" style="padding: 10px 14px; border: 1px solid #1f4372; border-radius: 2px; font-family:                        Helvetica, Arial,
                        sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; display:inline-block; ">Click
                            me</a></td>
                </tr>
                </tbody>
            </table>
        </td>
    </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

Attachments

To add an attachment to your Power Automate email, you need to provide a filename and the file content.

Below you see an example how to send an email with attachment from OneDrive.

To send an email with multiple attachments just click the ‘+ Add new item‘ button and once again provide name and content.