Can you please suggest any alternative approach for Sending and reading emails other than Outlook and microsoft exchange activities.
Because we’re facing lot of issues in production sending and reading emails in outlook, once we close and open outlook or restart the server all activities are working fine.
And also if we keep Outlook closed in production server, we’re unable to read or send email
If your mailbox is on Microsoft Office 365 then Integration or Azure AD app approach is the best approach here. For other providers you can use these activities (Except Exchange server) to read the emails.
Get POP3 Mail Message
Get IMAP Mail Messages
To Send Emails you can use these
Send SMTP Mail Message
Send IBM Notes Mail Message
Outlook works as a client application which downloads the emails continuously from server. Using Outlook activities we don’t really bother about how the Outlook sends or reads the email or authenticates because it’s been taken care by the Outlook.
If the Outlook is not opened, it will not load the new messages which might have arrived on server as outlook requires sometime to download these emails.
Outlook activities are also good option to automate email stuff if you could give some delays.
Best practice you can use with your current solution would be:
Open the Outlook in Init state - this will give some time to Outlook to download latest emails from the outlook.
After sending email add sufficient delay before the execution reaches to End state and close the session. [Sufficient delay could be use case specific like how big is your email going to be as if the email would have attachment it will take some time to send from Outbox. So use it as per requirement]