Email package

The Email package contains actions to automate email-related tasks through Exchange Web Services (EWS), Microsoft Outlook, and other email servers. You can use these actions for sending, receiving, and modifying messages, folders, and the status of messages.

The Email package supports EWS, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP protocols and enables you to perform the following tasks:

Manage and organize email messages and folders.
Download attachments from emails to specific folders on devices.
Extract data from emails to variables, to use as extracted data in other applications. For example, you can extract data from a sender's email and store it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Note: When you send an email, reply, or forward, the attachment size allowed in the email depends on your internet speed (timeout of 120 seconds) and the email server restrictions. If sending an attachment takes more than 120 seconds, the system displays an error due to timeout.

Note: If you want to automate an email-related task on a device using Microsoft Outlook, ensure that the Outlook application is open.

Considerations

Note: Some of the actions must be used within a Loop action. See Using the For each mail in mail box iterator.

Emails are retrieved based on the sequence of the folders listed in the inbox field. Within each folder, emails are retrieved based on received date and time in the last in, first out (LIFO) order. Additionally, you can apply filters on the following fields:

Types of emails: All, Read, and Unread
Subject
From a specific folder
From specific sender
Before, on, or after received date

Adhere to the following best practices when you filter and loop through folders that contain a large number of email messages:

After you have processed email messages, move them to another folder so that their duplicate email messages are not processed again during a subsequent run.
Try to reduce the number of messages in the mailbox.
The filtration works on the filter parameters provided by the user, such as type of email: All, Read, and Unread; Subject; from a specific folder; from a specific sender; or before, on, or after received date). Following are the types of filter mechanisms:
- Email server-side: The filtration that takes place on the server-side is much faster.
- Client-side: Filtration is performed on the local machine and is comparatively slow because the mail messages are first retrieved from the remote server and then filtered in the local machine.
- Hybrid: Some parameters are filtered on the server side and some on the client side.
Here is an explanation of how the filtration process works for various server types:
- EWS: All filtration is done on the server side and is hence much faster.
- Outlook client: Nothing is filtered on the server side, but the filtration process is faster because email messages are already present on the local machine.
- IMAP: Filtration for the Subject field is performed on the local machine and is slower. For the Before, on, or after received date parameter, the filtration for date is performed on the remote server, and for hour/min/second, it is performed on the local machine. For example, for the date 01/12/2022, filtration is performed on the remote server whereas for the time (hour/min/sec) 21:10:56, filtration is performed on the local machine.
- POP3: This server is the slowest of all because mails are retrieved from the remote server, and filtration is done in the local machine.
We recommend connecting using the EWS server and Outlook client as the filtration process is much faster when compared to IMAP and POP3 protocols.
Always use the Disconnect action if the Connect action is used to release a resource.

Before you start

Perform the following actions within the Email package as part of using the set of available actions:

Establish a connection with an email server using the Connect action.
While establishing the connection, specify the details and session name of the email server. Use this same session name for the other actions.
You do not have to establish a connection for the Forward, Reply, and Send actions because you will add the sender and email server details when you use these actions.
Use the actions to automate a task.
After you have automated all the email-related tasks, terminate the connection to the mail server using the Disconnect action.

Important: You must enable POP settings to automate an email-related task on the Gmail server using the POP3 protocol. See Read Gmail messages using POP.

Actions in the Email package

The Email package includes the following actions:


Action	Description
Change status	See Change status action.
Check if folder exists	See Check if folder exists action.
Delete all	See Delete all action.
Delete	See Delete action.
Disconnect	See Disconnect action.
Connect	See Using Connect action for Email.
Forward	See Using the Forward action.
Move all	See Move all action.
Move	See Move action.
Reply	See Using Reply action.
Save all attachments	See Save all attachments action.
Save attachments	See Save attachment action.
Save email	See Save email action.
Send	See Using the Send action.

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