Auto-Reply Demo

Overview

This demo flow triggers on every new Outlook 365 email that arrives in the connection owner's inbox, checks whether the subject contains a configured keyword, and sends a templated auto-reply back to the sender when it matches. It's a minimal pattern for keyword-gated auto-responders and is a good starting point for richer "out-of-office on demand" or "ticket created" reply automations.

Use Case

Mailboxes occasionally need a contextual auto-reply that fires only on specific subject keywords (e.g. urgent escalations to a now-vacant alias, or a "ticket received" acknowledgement for emails matching a project tag). Outlook's native rules and Out-of-Office can do simple cases but don't compose well with downstream automation. This flow shows the simplest cloud-flow shape for that pattern.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Keyword-based filtering keeps replies targeted, not noisy.
• Reply body lives in a Set Variable action — edit copy without touching flow logic.
• Branches cleanly to 'do nothing' on non-matching mail — no unintended replies.
• Single-connector deployment is trivial — no env vars or extra licensing.
• Designed as a teaching pattern: trigger → configure → branch → act.

Flow Architecture

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Promote keyword + body to env vars

Add flowlibs_AutoReplyKeyword and flowlibs_AutoReplyBody env vars and replace the variable initializers with parameters() reads — lets you redeploy copy without editing the flow.

Restrict to a sender domain

Change the If condition from contains(subject, keyword) to an and() that also checks endsWith(triggerOutputs()?['body/from'], '@partner.com').

Add a time-of-day window

Wrap the condition in another If that checks hour(utcNow()) against business-hour bounds.

Log every reply for audit

Add a Create item action against a SharePoint list inside the True branch to record subject, sender, and timestamp.

Match multiple keywords

Replace the single string variable with a JSON array and use a Filter Array on split(subject, ' ') against it instead of contains().

Switch to shared mailbox

Replace the trigger with When a new email arrives in a shared mailbox (V2) and use Reply to email (V3) in shared mailbox.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

contains(toLower(triggerOutputs()?['body/subject']), toLower(variables('varSubjectKeyword')))

triggerOutputs()?['body/id']

variables('varAutoReplyBody')

triggerOutputs()?['body/from']