Outlook.com Email Filter and Forwarder
Filter incoming Outlook.com emails by subject/sender rules and forward matching ones to your work Outlook 365 inbox.
Provided as-is, without warranty of any kind. Review and test each pattern in a non-production environment before deploying it to live automations. See our Terms.
Overview
This flow watches a personal Outlook.com inbox for new mail and evaluates each message against configurable subject and sender filters. When an email matches the rules, the flow forwards it to a designated Outlook 365 (work) mailbox so important personal messages are surfaced alongside business mail without manual triage. Non-matching messages are left in place and no action is taken.
Use Case
Knowledge workers who maintain a personal Outlook.com address for vendor accounts, side-projects, or family logistics often miss time-sensitive messages because they have to switch inboxes. This flow lets them define a short list of subject keywords and trusted senders, then automatically relays any matching mail into their primary Outlook 365 work inbox so it shows up in the same triage queue as everything else.
The flow is ideal for teams that:
- Users who juggle a personal Outlook.com address and a work Outlook 365 mailbox and want one place to triage urgent mail.
- Anyone receiving time-sensitive notifications (deliveries, account alerts, on-call paging) at a personal address that needs to reach a work inbox.
- Lightweight 'unified inbox' use cases where Exchange-side forwarding rules are unavailable or too coarse.
Flow Architecture
When a New Email Arrives (Outlook.com)
OnNewEmail (Outlook.com)Triggers on each new email that lands in the connected Outlook.com inbox. Configure the trigger's folder, importance, and include-attachments options to scope what the flow sees.
Initialize Filter Variables
Initialize variable (x3, in parallel)Initializes `varSubjectKeywords` (semicolon-delimited keywords), `varAllowedSenders` (semicolon-delimited sender addresses), and `varForwardTo` (destination Outlook 365 address) from the corresponding environment variables.
Check If Email Matches Filter Rules
If conditionEvaluates whether the incoming email matches either the subject-keyword list or the allowed-sender list. The condition uses an OR of two checks: any keyword from `varSubjectKeywords` appears (case-insensitively) in the subject, OR the sender address is contained in `varAllowedSenders`.
- Forward Email to Outlook 365 — Office 365 Outlook `SendEmailV2` action that composes a new message to `varForwardTo`, prefixes the subject with `[Fwd from Outlook.com]`, includes the original sender and received timestamp in the body, and re-attaches any files from the trigger output.
Empty branch — no action.
Environment Variables
| Schema name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| flowlibs_SubjectKeywords | String | invoice;urgent;delivery | Semicolon-delimited list of keywords. If any keyword appears (case-insensitively) in the email subject, the message is forwarded. |
| flowlibs_AllowedSenders | String | <configure> | Semicolon-delimited list of sender email addresses whose messages are always forwarded regardless of subject content. |
| flowlibs_ForwardTo | String | you@yourcompany.com | Destination Outlook 365 mailbox that matching personal emails are forwarded to. |
Connectors & Connections
| Connector | API name | Actions used |
|---|---|---|
| Outlook.com | shared_outlook | OnNewEmail (trigger) |
| Office 365 Outlook | shared_office365 | SendEmailV2 (Forward matching messages to the work inbox) |
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.
- Import the solution
- Import the FlowLibsOutlookEmailFilterForwarder solution into the target Power Platform environment.
- Authorize connections
- Sign in to both the Outlook.com (personal) and Office 365 Outlook (work) connection references when prompted.
- Set the destination address
- Update flowlibs_ForwardTo to the Outlook 365 mailbox that should receive forwarded mail.
- Configure subject keywords
- Edit flowlibs_SubjectKeywords with a semicolon-delimited keyword list (e.g. invoice;urgent;delivery). Matching is case-insensitive.
- Configure allowed senders
- Edit flowlibs_AllowedSenders with a semicolon-delimited list of sender addresses that should always be forwarded regardless of subject content.
- Tune the trigger folder
- By default the trigger watches the Inbox; change the trigger's Folder parameter if you want to watch a subfolder, or set Include Attachments to false if you don't want attachments forwarded.
- Turn on the flow
- The flow is delivered in a Stopped (Off) state — enable it after the variables and connections are configured.
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.
EXPR.01Subject lower-cased for keyword comparison
Lower-cased subject used as the left operand of the keyword check.
EXPR.02Split the subject-keyword list
Splits the semicolon-delimited keyword list into an array (lower-cased) for the contains-any check.
EXPR.03Split the allowed-senders list
Splits the semicolon-delimited sender list into an array (lower-cased) for the sender membership check.
EXPR.04Sender lower-cased
Lower-cased sender address used to test membership in the allowed-senders array.
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation.
Sign inNo comments yet. Be the first to share your experience with this flow.