Power Automate: How to generate an URL to an email?

I got this question on my “Microsoft Planner: Send an email and create task” from Kristen McCarty (thanks for the excellent question) regarding how to generate a URL that opens the email directly on Microsoft’s Outlook. It’s not difficult, but we need to understand what’s happening so that the formula makes sense.

The expression

Let’s start with the expression to move on with your life, but if you’re curious, I will explain it in the tail in the next section.

concat(‘https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox/id/’,replace(encodeUriComponent(triggerOutputs()?[‘body/conversationId’]),’_’,’%2B’))

So the formula uses the following functions:

We’re concatenating the URL for Office 365 Outlook’s email inbox plus the encoded ID of the message.

Please note that this formula only works if Microsoft maintains the same structure. If something changes, Microsoft won’t keep backward compatibility or warn us, so if it doesn’t work, please let me know, and we’ll try to figure out how to create another solution

Let’s look at the structure.

The overall structure

Microsoft defined the structure, so we can’t do a lot regarding that, but we can use the pieces to get to that URL.

The first part is the URL to Office 365 Office inbox. The URL is quite descriptive and indicates everything that we need to know. We want the item in the inbox with an ID.

We get this URL by opening any email on the inbox, like this:

We get something like this:

https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox/id/AAQkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgAQAM%2Bvnl2WtWFEvXLq8kH6kcs%3D

Let’s focus on the ID.

Please note that this ID is exclusive to this email on my environment. If you test on your environment you’ll get different IDs.

Let’s get the ID and parse it.

When we get the ID from somewhere

Using Power Automate, we can get the ID from the “When a new email arrives” trigger . In the trigger, we get the following:

{
    ...
    },
    "body": {
        "id": "AAMkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgBGAAAAAACvIW8tOruVQq_P-p9WUHDSBwC8MGg1BhiUTbxUOcauwKX2AAAAAAEMAAC8MGg1BhiUTbxUOcauwKX2AAKOYs4XAAA=",
        "receivedDateTime": "2022-02-28T14:24:50+00:00",
        "hasAttachments": false,
        "internetMessageId": "<3903be0c-ba36-467e-9213-93ded87daa9c@Spark>",
        "subject": "teste",
        "bodyPreview": "Manuel T Gomes\r\n\r\nFounder,\r\n\r\nSKILLFUL SARDINE",
        "importance": "normal",
        "conversationId": "AAQkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgAQAM_vnl2WtWFEvXLq8kH6kcs=",
        "isRead": false,
        "isHtml": true,
        "body": "<redacted>",
        "from": "manuel@skillfulsardine.com",
        "toRecipients": "manuel@manueltgomes.com",
        "attachments": []
    }
}

I redacted some parts of the reply because they don’t add much value here. Looking at the message, we see that the email has an “ID,” but not quite what we need. It doesn’t fit the ID we’re looking for:

AAQkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgAQAM%2Bvnl2WtWFEvXLq8kH6kcs%3D

But if we look at the “conversationId”, we can get almost what we need. We see the “%2B” and “%3D” values that compare with the original string map to the “_” and “=“ respectively.

We know how to encode these characters using the “encodeUriComponent” function. So let’s test it with a compose action.

encodeUriComponent(triggerOutputs()?['body/conversationId'])

We’ll get:

AAQkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgAQAM_vnl2WtWFEvXLq8kH6kcs%3D

Almost there. The ID has the underscore still not encoded. I tried with other functions, and it’s not encoded properly, so we need to do it ourselves by using the replace function. If we do:

replace(encodeUriComponent(triggerOutputs()?['body/conversationId']),'_','%2B')

We’ll get:

AAQkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgAQAM%2Bvnl2WtWFEvXLq8kH6kcs%3D

Does it look familiar? It’s exactly the URL that we need.

Building the URL

Finally let’s build the URL. This is the easy part since we only need to concatenate all the parts by using the concat function. Here’s the expression:

concat('https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox/id/',replace(encodeUriComponent(triggerOutputs()?['body/conversationId']),'_','%2B'))

With this we’ll get:

https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox/id/AAQkADhhNzYyNDgxLTNkNGYtNDhiNS1iOWUzLTllMDBmMzEzOTA4MgAQAM%2Bvnl2WtWFEvXLq8kH6kcs%3D

If you open this in your browser (with the ID generated by your email, otherwise you’ll get an error), you’ll get the email you’re looking for.

Final thoughts

The expression is simple, but it has this small gotcha that is simple once you know about it, but you can spend quite some time until you notice that the ID is not the same.

Have a suggestion of your own or disagree with something I said? Leave a comment or interact on Twitter and be sure to check out other Power Automate-related articles here.

Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash

Manuel Gomes

I have 18 years of experience in automation, project management, and development. In addition to that, I have been writing for this website for over 3 years now, providing readers with valuable insights and information. I hope my expertise allows me to create compelling, informative content that resonates with the audience.

View all posts by Manuel Gomes →

13 thoughts on “Power Automate: How to generate an URL to an email?

    1. Hi André,

      The link’s structure looks good. Notice that this will only work on your mailbox since only you have access to it.
      Another reason could be that the email was moved. Notice that the link contains “inbox,” meaning it’s located in the inbox. If it’s somewhere else, then the link changes.

      Could it be any of these options?

      Cheers
      Manuel

  1. My flow also redirects to the inbox in stead of the respective email. First you see the link to the email which then changes to the inbox link. Can you please help?

  2. I finally got it to work with following hyperlink schema
    “https://outlook.office365.com/mail/deeplink?ItemID=” + MessageID

  3. Thanks, it’s a great solution but I’d like to know if there’s a possibility to have this link as hyperlink. For example just clickable words: Link to email. I’m trying with href but I’m getting something like this in my task :

    Link to email<https:\\outlook.office365.com/owa/?ItemID=AAMkADU3NmUzNjBiLTMzYWUtNGZmNS1hYmUwLWJiNTkwZDlhOGI3MABGAAAAAADV_Mdkv8BhRKOTbqUv0yP6BwBuKED0FLwpTbR8wuHYXmmPAAAAAAEMAABuKED0FLwpTbR8wuHYXmmPAAOvlZ9RAAA=&exvsurl=1&viewmodel=ReadMessageItem>

  4. Funny thing here…
    I got the original link …/inbox/id… working when adding the message id instead of the conversation id. I then send a copy to a coworker. Doesn’t work in his environment. Outlook 365 opens, but the mail is not selected or opened.
    His mail url is much shorter than the one generated by the script.
    Any idea?
    The deeplink solution works, but just opens the complete mail in a new tab w/o the inbox displayed.

  5. Amazing! Any luck doing this with o365 group emails? I can’t figure out but being able to generate a link to a thread would be huge.

  6. Thanks Manuel for the post. Unfortunately I am a beginner in power Automate and would need some more help.
    My goal is:
    When a email is flagged the email will be added as a planner task with all attachments:
    Responsible: Me
    Deadline: arrival of email plus one day
    Attachment: also attached
    Bucket: Task from outlook
    Can you help?

  7. I got this to work for a shared mailbox.
    Trigger: When an email arrives in a shared mailbox (V2)
    Compose using dynamic content of Message Id. This feels pointless but without it I couldn’t access the Message Id in the later functions.
    Where you need to use the link, enter this as an expression: concat(‘https://outlook.office.com/mail/deeplink/read/?ItemID=’, encodeUriComponent(outputs(‘Compose_-_Message_Id’)), ‘&viewmodel=ReadMessageItem&path=&exvsurl=1’)
    Make sure your Compose action is named “Compose – Message Id” or adjust the expression.

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