Using Power Automate to Forward Veeam Community Notifications to Teams

I recently started playing around with Power Automate after a team member asked me to share the status of a daily backup job in a Teams chat. I tried to use Teams' "Get Channel Email" function, however it appears the organization has blocked that functionality. Perhaps they don't want channels filled with emails, and prefer us to use native alerting interfaces.

I was left with the only option of using Power Automate, or "Workflows" in teams. I started with a simple template to forward emails to a chat, filtered it by subject line of that job's email report, and saved the workflow.

This made me wonder what else Power Automate could be used for. Given my renewed goal to participate actively in the Veeam Community, I decided to start there.

The Goals:

1. Receive all notifications from the Veeam Community into a chat within Microsoft Teams
2. Trim the content down to include only the user, and the message preview
   1. Removing the image at the top of each email
   2. Removing "Hi Tommy O'Shea,"
   3. Removing all text after the preview
3. Mark email as read, or move email back to Inbox If it fails to send to Teams

The Challenges:

1. Extracting the preview from the emails
2. Adjusting to compensate for multiple end phrases used in Community emails
3. The comment preview test stayed black, making it impossible to read in dark mode.

Here are the steps I took (Optimized for trial and error, minus redoing things)

Preparing Microsoft Outlook for the Workflow

1. Create a dedicated folder for Veeam Community Emails
2. Configure a rule to have Veeam Community Emails to go to a dedicated folder in Outlook. Run this rule.

Note: It is important to move all these emails before creating the Flow, because if they show up in the folder afterwards, it will try to process hundreds and possible thousands of emails, depending on how long you've been with the community. This will spam you with notifications, and it will also force Microsoft to throttle you.

3. Right click on the folder and mark all emails as read.

Note: It is important to move all these emails before creating the Flow, because if they show up in the folder afterwards, it will try to process hundreds and possible thousands of emails, depending on how long you've been with the community. This will spam you with notifications, and it will also force Microsoft to throttle you.

Creating the Workflow

1. Open Power Automate, and sign in with your Microsoft work credentials
2. Click on "Create"

3. Click on "Automated Cloud Flow"

4. Create a Flow Name, in this example I used "Veeam Notification Example"
5. Start typing "When a new email arrives", and select "When a new email arrives (V3)
6. Click Create
7. Click on the only card showing, which is to be the trigger for this workflow.

8. It will open the card parameters on the left. Select the ones you want to have the notification trigger for. I selected the To, From, and Folder parameters, and filled each.

9. After creating this trigger, you need to perform some expressions on it to extract the preview from the email. You can do this by clicking on the "+" button below the trigger card

10. On the action menu, search for "Compose", then click on "Data Operation > Compose"

This step was the most complicated for me by far, and I have to admit that I used Microsoft's Copilot AI to assist with creating the expressions I needed. This step took many revisions. Using Copilot within Power Automate never seemed to work, I had to use a separate instance in Teams.

Here is the exact expression I used:

if(
    and(
        greaterOrEquals(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Shea,'), 0),
        or(
            greaterOrEquals(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Check it out'), 0),
            greaterOrEquals(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Kind Regards'), 0)
        )
    ),
    substring(
        triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'],
        add(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Shea,'), length('Shea,')),
        min(
            sub(
                min(
                    if(greaterOrEquals(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Check it out'), 0), indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Check it out'), length(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'])),
                    if(greaterOrEquals(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Kind Regards'), 0), indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Kind Regards'), length(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body']))
                ),
                add(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Shea,'), length('Shea,'))
            ),
            sub(length(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body']), add(indexOf(triggerOutputs()?['body/Body'], 'Shea,'), length('Shea,')))
        )
    ),
    ''
)

Essentially, this expression extracts content from the body of an email, starting after my name (I used "Shea,", because If I put "Tommy O'Shea", the apostrophe in my name breaks everything) and ending before either "Check it out" or "Kind Regards", whichever comes first. If the required phrases are not found, it returns an empty string.
 

12. Start typing "Post message in a chat or channel", and select that from below

13. Select the following:

Post as: Flow Bot

Post in: Chat with Flow Bot

Recipient: Your email

Message: You have a notification from the Veeam Community Hub: (or whatever message you like)

14. Hover over the text box until a blue button shows up, and click on the lightning bult to select a dynamic expression.

15. Then click on "Outputs" to grab the output of the expression created earlier:

It will now look like this: 

16. Create a new action by clicking the "+" button

17. Create two actions after one another, the first being "Mark as read or unread (V3)", the second being "Move email (V2).
18. For both of these you need to set the message ID it will be performing the action on. Insert a dynamic expression by clicking the blue lightning bolt again, clicking "See more" on the "When a new email arrives (V3)" line, then scroll down to "Message id" and click on that.

19. Modify the "Move Email (V2)'s settings to run only if it doesn't succeed. This way it will show back up in your inbox and you won't miss any emails.

20. Modify the "Mark as read or Unread (V3) action and set the message id and "Mark As" advanced parameter to be "Yes", meaning Read.
21. Modify the settings to run after "Post message in a chat or channel" and delete the "Run after setting for the "move Email"

The Flow should look like this:

22. Upon saving the flow, you will need to wait for a new email to be received from the Veeam community.

Final Result

Here is what it looks like in Microsoft Teams. 

Unfortunately I was not able to find a way to get the preview text to be visible in dark mode. I'm sure it could probably be done, but for now the workaround is to use light mode for teams.

What does everyone think? Is there value in having these notifications come into Teams versus your email inbox? Is there any other message processing that you'd want to be done on the message being sent into teams?

Thank you for your time, and have a great week everyone!