Outlook Monitoring with O365

[Minty]

I've been asked to look at providing a method of monitoring a shared generic Inbox in O365. (Think of it like a service call mailbox service@yourco.com)
This would be pretty straightforward in an Exchange/SQL on-site environment, but with cloud storage involved, it becomes a little more interesting.

I'm trying to capture response times, so I guess I need to see when an email is replied to and ideally log this, along with the original messages sent time and who it was from, into a database table for reporting purposes.

Has anyone done anything like this with an O365 / Azure set-up?

Googling has led me to lots of "25% there" solutions, but not a lot more.

 

[NauticalGent]

I did something remotely similar to this some years back by adding some code to the ThisOutlookSection module. I don't have the exact code but I modified it from a thread I found at ExpertsExchqnge...but I think you already now this.

Is the O365/Azure environment so different that it would not work?

 

[Isaac]

Flow (Power Automate) is something I've used to trigger a flow "when an email arrives with certain text in body/subject". And since you can combine Sharepoint and PA, you could, theoretically, set up a back-and-forth system where you know what the special identifying text of a message is (because, perhaps, your system is the one that created the text), and then looked for that same email response - etc.

This ought to work perfectly with O365 email, I think - at least it does with mine.

 

[Minty]

Coming back to this, I can and have easily connected from Access to a O365 email account.
The fly in the ointment is trying to do this 24/7 without having an instance of Access running somewhere.

a) I wouldn't want to rely on Access running 24/7 somewhere, even on a server.
b) It would be really handy to connect Azure directly to the inbox somehow, as I can operate triggers on the data source.

These Guys seem to have a connector, but I can't believe it's not possible to do this directly without the need for third-party things.
If not I'm happy to pay up but the tight-wad in me likes a free solution.

 

[Isaac]

I assume Power Automate isn't an option for you? (As it does exactly that)

 

[Minty]

I'm just investigating this as we speak. I had completely forgotten that I looked at this about a year ago...
The syntax for calling a stored procedure with parameters is "interesting"

 

[Isaac]

Oh, in PA? I believe you! It has some very strange syntaxes...of course, so did SSIS expressions...they were 'like' several things, but not quite..