Hi everyone,
In my process, I use the ‘Start Process’ activity to open Outlook and the ‘Send Outlook Mail’ activity to send emails. I noticed that when the job runs in unattended mode, Outlook closes after completion. However, if the VM is open during execution, Outlook remains open. How can I ensure Outlook stays open after the job completes? Since the robot runs multiple times a day, reopening Outlook every time is not ideal.
Please pour your thoughts and experiences.
Thank you.
What you’re experiencing with Outlook closing after the job completes in unattended mode is an expected behavior. In unattended robot scenarios, when a process finishes, its associated applications are typically closed to free resources for subsequent tasks. This is particularly true when the robot is running in session zero, which does not retain any session context like an interactive user session would.
Currently, there isn’t a direct setting in UiPath to change this behavior through Orchestrator or the robot settings.
If this does not resolve your concerns effectively, you might want to consider switching to another mail mechanism such as SMTP or using Office365 APIs, as they do not depend on having the Outlook application open and will facilitate more flexible email operations without worrying about the application’s open state.
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MAPI, SMTP, Exchange are what UiPath, Microsoft, and most RPA developers recommend.
Note: Outlook is designed for interactive use, not background unattended automation—which is why backend email activities (MAPI, SMTP, Exchange) are what UiPath, Microsoft, and most RPA developers recommend
. Use “Send Outlook Mail Message” Activity (Recommended Way)
Other way you can put Outlook on startup folder but is not recommended way
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Dear @reshmaK,
Instead of using GUI based outlook why dont you swich to Desktop Outlook activities which works at background wihout opening outlook.
This will make you automation more faster & reilable.
Outlook desktop/ Office 365 activities:
Kindly mark as solution, if it resolves your issue. 
Br,
NikZ
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Instead of opening the Outlook explicitly using start process activity, add Outlook to the startup application on your server. This will ensure whenever a user logs into the server, Outlook will be opened automatically.
Regarding your concern about inefficiency of opening Outlook everytime, you can’t control and should not control as well. This is because, for every job, bot logs in to the server as a fresh windows session and after job finished it closes the session automatically. This happens similar to what we do like login and login out on a machine.
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Welcome to the community
Ideally in unattended scenario bot logs into the machine and then logsout at end so any application open will be closed..that is how the behaviour is
Instead of outlook switching to o365/integration services would be more ideal
Cheers
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