Tutorial: Iterating Through Outlook Mails and Saving Attachments

In this tutorial, we will create an automation that saves the attachments to all the emails in an Outlook Search Folder to your computer.

We will create a project and start by adding a Use Desktop Outlook App activity to indicate the Outlook account to use. In this activity, we will add a For Each Email activity to indicate that we want to iterate through the emails in a folder. We will then add the activities to repeat inside For Each Email.

Create a Temp folder on your computer and a Search Folder in Outlook.
1. Create a folder named Temp at the root of the C: drive on your computer.
2. Open Outlook, then right-click Search Folders in the Folder pane and select New Search Folder.
3. In the New Search folder window, select Create a custom Search Folder > Choose.
4. In the Custom Search Folder window, enter "Last week's attachments" in the Name box and then select Criteria.
5. In the Messages tab of the Search Folder Criteria window, from the drop-down menus next to Time select received and Last Week.
6. From the More Choices tab, select Only items with and then one or more attachments from the adjacent drop-down menu.
7. Click OK three times to close the windows and save the search folder.
Set up the project.
Create a new blank project using the default settings.
Add the Outlook account to the project.
1. In the Activities panel, select the Mail tab and then double-click Use Desktop Outlook App. The activity is added to the Designer panel.
2. In the activity, the default email account is already selected in the Account field. If you want to use a different account, select it from the drop-down menu.
  
  In the Reference as field, leave the default value Outlook as the name by which to refer to the account in the automation.
Iterate through the messages in the Outlook folder.
1. In the Activities panel, drag the For Each Email activity and drop it inside the Use Desktop Outlook App activity.
2. In the For Each Email activity, click Plus on the right side of the In emails from field, and then select Outlook > [Search Folders] > [Last week's attachments] to select the search folder created in the account Outlook. Your selection is displayed in the In emails from field as Last week's attachments.
  
  You have indicated that you want to iterate through the emails in the Outlook Search Folder Last week's attachments.
Save the attachments for each message to a folder on your computer.
1. In the Activities panel, drag the Save Email Attachments activity and drop it inside the For Each Email activity.
2. In the Save Email Attachments activity:
  - Click Plus on the right side of the Email field, and then select CurrentMail to indicate that the email whose attachments you want to save is the current email you are iterating through.
  - Click Browse next to the Save to folder field, and then browse to and select the folder on your computer where to save the attachments. For this example, we created a folder called Temp on the C drive of the computer.
3. Click Save in the StudioX ribbon to save the automation, then click Run to execute the automation.
  
  The attachments from each email in the Outlook folder Temp are saved to the Temp folder on the computer.
Download example