Outlook Issue- Is there any robust solution for using the Outlook on bot machine?

Hi Guys,

I think all of us had face the outlook issue on the production machine where the unattended robot is installed.

Sometimes it is getting time out, sometimes it is taking too long to open the outlook application (more than 5+ minutes.) Couples of times emails are stuck in outbox.
We tried several things like adding the delay and opening the outlook application so that email will not be in outbox.

But sometimes it is working and sometimes it does not.

Can anyone please suggest me the workaround or the fixes which I need to do here? So that this issue will get permanently resolved.

Thanks,
Shreyash.

@supermanPunch @Palaniyappan @Gokul001 @loginerror @Pablito

Hi @shreyash_shirbhate

You can use some services like(Mailjet namely) to send mail instead of outlook

Regards
Sudharsan

Hi @shreyash_shirbhate ,

We do face this issue at the initial part, where it is opening up the application. But after the Application is opened up, it does act fast and there wasn’t much of a hindrance that could be detected.

As an early step in the Process, Make sure the Outlook Application is Active/open. After this wait period, it shouldn’t pose a problem later on related to delays.

Also, Do ensure that Kill Process is not done on the Outlook Application/ Done only minimal. This way latency/delay should be handled.

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Hi @supermanPunch,

We are also opening the outlook application as a early part of step but sometime it take 2 minutes to open and sometimes 5+ more minutes.

Which activity did you use to make sure the Outlook Application is Active/open? (I am taking all the processes list using get processes activity and if there is no “Outlook.exe” is present in the list then I am opening the outlook. But as I said opening timing is different, so that’s why it is getting timeout. )

Our client machine has Outlook 16. Do you think that is the cause of the problem?

Also, we are not doing kill process frequently.

Thanks Arpan for your help.

Did you try the Office 365 package activities (it does not rely on the opening of the local Outlook application, it relies only on the Microsoft Graph API calls)?

Reference: https://docs.uipath.com/activities/docs/about-the-microsoft-office-365-activities-pack
https://docs.uipath.com/activities/docs/about-the-microsoft-office-365-activities-pack

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Hello @shreyash_shirbhate
Try This,

  1. Troubleshoot the Outlook application.
  2. Use Open application to open the outlook Application at Beginig of the process (initialization), after that process will continue
  3. Increase the Timeout property.
  4. Try the process with the Retry activity(5 times).
  5. Ensure that any pop-up appears while sending the messages, like the confirmation Pop up.
  6. OrElse Use SMTP to send mail.

Hi @marian.platonov,

Thanks for your reply.

Right now, I don’t have access. I will try and let you know once I have the access.

Also, we do have three accounts which we have added to outlook application and we are using the different accounts for different processes.

So this functionality will work with office 365 API Calls? Like we can send the email using different ID’s?

Sample ID’s: abc@company.com, xyz@company.com and qwe@company.com

Check here https://docs.uipath.com/activities/docs/office365-send-mail

  • Account - (Optional) The email address with which to interact. This may include any shared mailbox to which the current user has access rights. If left blank, the current user’s account is assumed.

Note:

Account field is mandatory for ApplicationIdAndSecret and ApplicationIdAndCertificate authentication types.

  • From - The email address from which the email is sent. If left blank, this defaults to the current user’s address. Otherwise, any address that has been assigned SendAs rights on the current user’s mailbox may be entered.

Hi @shreyash_shirbhate
You can use latest modern activities in UiPath.mail package. Please find the screenshot in below.

image

Regards,
Kaviyarasu N

We would like to move to this but the primary issue with it is the documentation is pretty thin. I hadn’t seen that particular link so I just looked at the quickstart (get and move) because email is what we want to do.

It’s an example of the thin documentation, with no screenshots, only a basic example of two operations - nothing about attachments, getting info from the emails like sent date and body, etc.

That example isn’t even complete. Steps 5-8 talk about getting the mail messages (and the bullet in step 8 is wrong, it should be an array of that datatype, not just that datatype). Then after getting the emails in steps 5-8 it just says “run it and verify the emails were moved.” Except it never discusses the steps to actually move the emails.

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