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 have a simple goal: I want to turn on a busylight device (basically an LED light) when a new email is received to signal people to check the computer for the new email.

For that, I have a simple Zap connecting to my Office 365 account and triggering an email event on “New Email”. The event is processed via Luxafor which turns on busylight to Red Color. With that, the Busylight turns red when a new email is received. So far so good. But obviously I want it to change color (i.e. switch to no color) again when the email is read. This is where I’m stuck. I don’t find a way to send an event for “when all new emails have been read” or similar.

The only solution I found so far is to only flash the light for some seconds when a new email is received and then stop flashing but it’s not really what I want because potentially people miss the flashing event.

Am I missing something or is this impossible?

Hi @danielfr 

Good question.

Neither the Microsoft Outlook nor the Office 365 Zap app integrations have a trigger event for “read” email.

Hey there, @danielfr! 

Thanks for flagging this in community! I did some digging and while I wasn’t able to find open feature requests for a “Read Email” trigger, it might be worth opening a new one with my friends in support.

It doesn’t guarantee implementation but it may help us gauge interest moving forward! 🙂

Hi @danielfr!

As Christina mentioned, we don’t have an existing feature request for this and I can’t think of a way to do this directly through the Outlook inbox, but I’m wondering if a semi-manual solution would work for you?

You could set up a Zap that is triggered by a webhook and use that to turn the light off. Then you just need a service or app that will send the webhook. For example, I use Alfred to send webhooks to Zapier based on a keyboard command. This blog post explains how you can do that: Zapier for Alfred

Obviously you don’t have to use Alfred, that’s just what I’m familiar with. There are also physical products like Flic that integrate with Zapier and would pretty well for this kind of use - just tap the flic button when you’ve finished checking any unread emails. 

I know that’s not the solution you were looking for but let us know if you think it might work!

 

thanks! I opened a ticket with the support. Thanks for the idea with Flic, it’s indeed a soltion. Maybe there are also busylights that have a physical button to reset the light to off. The one I’m using unfortunately doesn’t.

In the concrete case of Luxafor, I can actually assign keyboard shotcuts to reset the light. It’s just not fully automated and might lead to human errors...

Terms & Conditions