Hello,
I’ve built an automation that filters through e-mails from an inbox, downloads the attachment for a specific one based on certain criteria(from, subject and date), it also reads and archives the same e-mail so that it will not be reused, then uses said data for a specific purpose.
The automation runs daily and works great except for one glaring issue: It must be run twice daily because the first time it runs every day, it uses data from yesterday’s email. I can’t understand why this is happening, despite tweaking my filters repeatedly many times over the course of months still it uses yesterday’s data on the first run. Here is an image of the date filter I am using:
On the first run of the day, the bot does not read or archive today’s email, but it does on the second run, where it also downloads the correct attachment, saves it locally and then runs perfectly using the correct data. It makes no sense to me why the bot would behave so differently for each run based on which occurrence it is originated from. Please help! I am at my wit’s end.
The issue is that the plug-in for Outlook doesn’t work properly. It does not update the inbox before it performs the action of downloading the attachments from the e-mail. So in the first instance each day, the bot is searching for an e-mail that does not exist in the Outlook instance that is being searched.
It was working the second time because the previous bot would send out an email as the last action, working as a de facto refresh of the inbox so that the next time the bot was run, today’s email would be present for downloading.