A lot of users ask me if there’s a way to send a file from a particular folder as an email attachment automatically, while using Outlook. My mind often went blank with that question as I had no clear way to do that. Yes, there are some advanced ways to do anything when it comes to Outlook and other Office products. If you know how to set up macros, you can manipulate the behavior of such applications like Word, Outlook, or Onedrive to anything that you want.
How to Send Files Automatically as an Email Attachment from Any Specified Folder!
But not a lot of users are familiar with the programming required to write macros to manipulate Outlook’s behavior beyond its default features.
Recently, I found out about an amazing and quite frankly priceless free service called “Flow” by Microsoft itself. There is a premium account as well for additional features. It’s an online service that can be used on a web-browser by entering the URL: flow.microsoft.com. If you are familiar with the IFTTT service, then you would understand what ‘Flow’ is. It allows you to connect difference apps and services to follow through on any particular action or behavior, if the conditions are met.
Microsoft Flow
One of the features I found out “Flow” is absolutely amazing. You can send an automatic email with a file attached from a specified folder. It is not required Outlook or any other desktop-based email client. So, it’s actually done on the server side and there are no actual programs used on your computer to do this. You just need an email account with any service like Gmail or Outlook.com or Hotmail.
As soon as a new file is created inside that folder (or moved from another folder), “Flow” will send an email to the recipients you specify. You can also add a subject line, content of the email, Cc, Bcc, and many other options.
To use “Flow” in its full glory can get quite complicated, because it can do almost anything. There are dozens of possibilities that you can specify, and sending a file automatically is just one of them. Each unique automated process is called a template and there are countless templates you can choose from. You can also create your own new template with highly complex and unique properties that do exactly what you want them to.
For this article, I am going to be focusing solely on this one simple task of sending a file as an attachment to a specified recipient from a specific OneDrive folder. So, if you don’t already have a OneDrive account, I suggest you sign up for it. It’s free and highly valuable.
Although, if you are using Windows 10, chances are you already have OneDrive account. The program installed on your PC.
Here are the actual steps to set this up.
- First, sign up on Flow.Microsoft.com with your email address. Verify the email address and then login.
- Now, look for the template “Send OneDrive files to an email” using the search option and open the template. Or use this link: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/3e19048d2cd74427aedc6374afdac8fe/send-onedrive-files-to-an-email/.
- Sign in to both OneDrive and your email account you want it to send an email from.
- Specify the folder where you will create the file that you need to send automatically.
- Now, specify the values for actual email you want to send. (like the recipients (to, cc, bcc), subject, email content, and more).
- Click “Save”.
Related Article: Different ways to attach file to an email in Outlook
Now whenever you will create a file in your specified folder or copy a new file to it, an email will be automatically sent to all the recipients you specified in your “Flow” template.
There is an option in the outlook that if you have to send one attachment to the several emails then you can set that automatically same attachment can be attached to all the emails.