Graph API Outlook - Inconsistencies in SendMail-function

[til.minet]

Hello community,

We recently established our app registration and are getting ready to use the Graph API objects from the DX. I started to experiment with the Graph API Outlook VBO and found the following issues. I am a little worried that I just scratched the surface.

There are three different requests that allow me to send or prepare e-mail-messages. "Send Mail", "Create Message" and "Create Message in Folder".

I suppose "Send Mail" would be one of the actions most commonly used. The input parameters allow me to define a body content - but I cannot choose if I want to send the body as text or HTML. The parameter has no description and I can only find out what content is expected by looking in the Web API definition. If I want to send an e-mail in HTML, which we mostly did with the Outlook VBO. Even worse: There is a parameter "saveToSentItems" in the request body which is also hard-coded. The description of the Send Mail-action tells me that the message is saved in "Sent Items" by default. Too bad that this parameter is hard-coded as "false" in the request body.

To my understanding it should be possible to choose the content type as an input parameter. Same for saveToSentItems.

Next action is "Create Message". Same story, but the content type is hard coded as "HTML". No description about that either.

And, to sum this up, "Create Message in Folder". From my understanding this should at least behave the same way as "Create Message", but see for yourself - hard coded body content as text again.

Do I misunderstand something or is there still room for optimization in this API definition? With these mistakes in even the most basic actions I tend to get the feeling that it might be easier and less frustrating to create the whole definitions myself.

Does anybody have more experience with the other assets? Are the other ones more usable than this one?

Best regards
Til

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Til Minet
RPA Developer
EWE AG Germany
Oldenburg
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[ewilson]

Hi @RaviSingh,

The 4MB limit is something impose by Microsoft. There are two other options for dealing with attachments in Outlook via Graph:

1. Attach as a MIME-encoded attachment
2. Attach a link to the actual file (assuming it resides on OneDrive, SharePoint, or somewhere else that can reached by the recipient).

#2 would obviously address the 4MB limit as the only thing that would be in the actual email is a hyperlink. I'm not sure about #1 as MIME-encoding an attachment tends to increase the file size a bit. We don't support either of these options at the moment in the Microsoft Graph - Outlook connector though. I can add enhancements for both to our backlog, but no idea what the delivery timing will be yet.

Let me do a little more research.

Cheers,
​​

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Eric Wilson
Director, Integrations and Enablement
Blue Prism Digital Exchange
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