Managing Emails with Rules & Notifications in Teams with Workflows

Question

Hi Team!

I have an Outlook account through my work. I usually use the New Outlook for desktop to access everything. I need help/guidance/instruction on two partnering actions: a) Automatically moving an incoming email from one inbox to my main inbox, and b) Getting a notification card in a Teams chat space when that happens, via a workflow.

CONTEXT:

I recently received several inboxes for distribution lists (these distros are not based in Teams or Groups, but managed by our IT Admin team). Some of these appear at the bottom of my main inbox, under the expanding “Shared with Me” menu, while others appear as just another inbox on my list.

I have also made a few more distros for various Teams/Groups that I manage, or created myself,, which all appear under the expanding “Groups” menu at the bottom of my main inbox list as well.

I’ve set up some simple rules to categorize emails based on senders, some to flag as important based on key words, you know, the usual stuff.

Having succeeded in that, I tried to create some simple workflows in the New Teams.

As I work with several windows open at once, and some of the emails that come in to any one of these distros might need a review by other members of my team, I created workflows (based on the available templates) that will send notification cards to specific Teams chat rooms, based on which distro was associated.

I noticed that those workflows only “caught” the emails when the emails arrived in my main inbox. So, I set about making a couple more rules to have the new incoming emails from the distros get copied to my main inbox, particularly as I don’t automatically get a notification when something comes through.

SIDE NOTE: I prefer doing it this way since I work my main inbox as if it was a To-Do list, filing things away as I complete them.

In all versions of Outlook I used to create these rules, the option to copy existed, but only in “old” or “web” versions of Outlook did my inbox appear as a destination choice.

The rule I created for the Groups/Teams distros works just fine, but any attempt at creating a rule for the non-Groups/Teams was ultimately unsuccessful, regardless of the the various combinations of location, logic, or software platform I used.

Based on this troubleshooting experience, I’m fairly confident that if I can get a good rule to automatically copy an email from one of the other distro inboxes to my main inbox, the workflow will work! (Cross your fingers)

I’m more than willing to delete all my rules and workflows and start over, if it means getting this done correctly, once and for all.

Can someone please help???

With hope,

Claudia MFK