Skip to main content

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Learning Resources
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell Zapier's products AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Share your knowledge
Give back to the Community by sharing your automation wins and helping to answer questions.

Share your success See unanswered questions User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

I’d like to know if it’s possible to automate email responses for incoming emails meeting certain criteria in Outlook?

Specifically, I want to create an email template that sends to any emails I receive that contain certain keywords in the subject line AND (importantly) are from senders I’ve never received an email from before.

I don’t know if any of this is possible so would be grateful to hear from anyone in the Community that might know if I can achieve this!

Thanks,

Liam

Hi @LiamA! For what you want to do here, it looks possible with Microsoft Outlooks list of triggers and actions. You’d have to create a Zap along these lines:

  1. Trigger - Microsoft Outlook - New Email
  2. Action - Microsoft Outlook - Find a Contact
    1. This is to search if they are on your existing list of contacts. You’ll want to select Yes on the field Should this step be considered a "success" when nothing is found? field, as you’ll want the Zap to continue if no contact is found.
  3. Action - Filter 
    1. This is where you can set the conditions to continue if the contact isn’t in your list of contacts (Step 2) + input keywords for subjects of emails.
  4. Action - Microsoft Outlook - Send Email

Give that a try and see if that works!

Hi Jess,

This sounds great, thanks!

My only concern would be: do I need to add all the people in my inbox to my contacts list first for this to work?

I never add people to my contacts list so this would take a long time to go through and sort out. Is there another way where a Zap would just know whether that person had been in touch before based off my inbox?

If I were to go just based off the email address it’s sent to + keywords contained in the subject line. Is this a lot easier? Might still be able to get it to work with this.

Thanks,

Liam

Hey @LiamA, just stepping in for Jess here! Yes, you would need to ensure that folks who’ve emailed you previously have been added to your contact list for this to work. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to determine this just based off of receiving the email as that kind of data about whether your inbox has seen that sender or not before, is not available in what is returned to us through the Outlook API. 

If you think you can get the result you’re after just based off of keywords and email addresses, I would definitely encourage you to try it out! Please keep us posted - we’d love to continue helping out where we can. 🙂

Terms & Conditions