Read Outlook email subject and added to the body

[Zumo]

Hello all,

 

I've been trying to create a workflow that will read a part of the subject of the email, example:

 

Incident 123456789 -> title

 

I want to grab the number and added to the body, example.

 

Hello,

 

Thank you for your contact, my name John Doe, and I've picked your incident number "incident number".

(...)

 

Best regards,

 

john doe

 

I'm unable to find any examples or a query to read the subject and extract the subject information.

 

any help would be greatly appreciated.

[giovanni]

hi @Zumo welcome to the Forum. If you are willing to use the old Outlook interface, it should be straightforward with Applescript (e.g. this script). The "New  Outlook" doesn't have (yet?) Applescript support, doesn't use an sqlite database, and I am not aware of other ways to interact programmatically with it. I hope this helps!

[vitor]

29 minutes ago, giovanni said:

The "New  Outlook" doesn't have (yet?) Applescript support

 

Is the new Outlook an Electron app? If so, it won’t support AppleScript for the foreseeable future because Electron doesn’t (but don’t seem to be against implementing it).

[giovanni]

14 minutes ago, vitor said:

Is the new Outlook an Electron app?

not sure, this is a 'technical' presentation but Electron is not mentioned... they seem to be working on an AppleScript integration.

[Zumo]

Thank @giovanni and @vitor, as it turns out the old outlook is not available 🥲 

 

I was thinking to use an Alfred workflow to get this information, it seems that it is not possible.

From my understanding we are talking about an external script to get that information the same way I could use python to that.

[vitor]

@Zumo Essentially, it depends on Outlook if you can extract information from it or not.

[giovanni]

1 hour ago, Zumo said:

the old outlook is not available

which version are you using? In the Outlook menu you should see 'New Outlook' with a checkmark if you are using the new version. Unchecking it will revert to the previous version. 

[Zumo]

@giovanni, company actually took that option off, people were complaining about the old office was crashing a lot with the newer updates of the MacOS.

Don't ask me how they did it, I didn't even knew that it was possible to remove options from Microsoft software.

[Zumo]

@vitor, my main question is how can it be done through workflow?

The documentation about workflow in Alfred is somewhat complex to understand and beyond that it seems more likely that I will have to do some python programming to get it done.

[Vero]

@Zumo Putting in layman's terms what @giovanni and @vitor have been saying, the first step before any workflow can be created is whether the information you need (accessing the subject lines and contents of your Outlook emails) can be acquired out of Outlook.

 

Once that piece of the puzzle is answered, THEN a workflow could be used to do the rest.

 

For now, you can start researching by asking the Outlook community whether there are ways for external tools to access the information you need, and if so, how that would be done. It's a step that doesn't require programming knowledge, but rather some digging around and speaking to the Outlook community