Automatically adding text of an Outlook-Email as note to a Planner task in a Teams team

Question

tl;dr: I want to automatically create a task for a group from a mail which includes the text of the mail.

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Our (non-IT/non-programming) team receives tasks per email on a daily basis. Currently those mails are manually entered into our Outlook team-calendar, including a colour code indicating their current status. The mails themself are attached to the "appointments", which are being sorted by urgency. When the tasks are being worked on, the processor adds their name and changes the colour code to "in process". Once the task is done, an answer-mail is sent back to the person who comissioned the task.

We want to migrate those tasks into Teams, or more precisely into a Tasks-list added to our Teams channel.

It is important for a smooth workflow to connect the email itself and the created task to each other, since the email contains relevant information, e.g. links.

I am rather open as to how that connection is realized (attachment, link, added as note, ...).

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I am able to create a flow in PowerAutomate which scans emails to our mailing list for certain words/characters and then creates a task in a bucket corresponding to those tags, using the title of the mail as the task's title.

I tried to also add the text of the mail to the task's title, which resulted in a title exceeding the 255 characters limit.

I saw no option to add the text e.g. as a note, or the whole email as an attachment to the task - but on the other hand today is my first day using PowerAutomate.

Answer 1

Larger data about the task is positioned in TaskDetails entity, which exists for each task and can be populated as part of the task creation. Content of the mail (or any other larger text) can be added to the description field on Task Details (in V1.0). This field is plain text, e.g. doesn't support formatting. We also have notes field on Task Details (in Beta), which supports rich text (html). The fields are connected. I'm not exactly sure how to set these in Power Automate, but they are available in the API to be used.

You may also be interested in previewType field which allows the content of the description to be shown on the task card without having to go to the task details, and also you'll probably be interested in CreationSource field on the task in Beta allows tasks to be associated with other items outside of tasks, like emails in this case. We also have Business Scenarios that is designed for scenarios likes this, however, it requires more of a setup and isn't available in Power Automate.