Automating email in Outlook: rules, templates, Copilot and Power Automate

Take a hypothetical customer service manager at a distribution company. In the morning she has dozens of new messages: orders, questions about delivery status, system notifications, newsletters and emails she is only copied in on. She spends the first half hour sorting before she replies to anything important.

Before you automate anything, check what your email actually consists of. For a week, note how many emails you receive in a few categories and how much time each one takes. These are the types of message that come up most often:

Email automation is best built up from the simplest tools to the most complex. Each level needs more preparation, but also handles more difficult situations. The table below shows what each level offers and what it costs.

In new Outlook for Windows and on the web, you will find rules under Settings → Mail → Rules. In classic Outlook, they are under File → Manage Rules & Alerts. The quickest way to create a rule is to right-click a message and choose “Rules”.

Note one difference. Rules that play a sound or run something on the computer only work in classic Outlook, and only while it is open. Simple sorting rules run on the server, even when the computer is switched off. Five are enough to start with:

Do not write a fresh reply to repetitive questions every time. In new Outlook you can save them in “My Templates”, and in classic Outlook as Quick Parts. You can then insert a reply to a question about your terms of business in two clicks and just add the details.

You can set up automatic replies in Outlook in advance, separately for people inside and outside the company. On a shared mailbox, such as the orders mailbox, they can confirm receipt and state the response time. But do not promise a timescale in them that the team will not meet.

Microsoft Bookings, available in the Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium plans, can take over arranging meeting times. The customer gets a link to a page showing available slots and chooses a time, and the meeting goes into your calendar.

Copilot in Outlook summarises long threads, pointing to the messages the key decisions came from. It writes draft replies based on your prompt and suggests how to improve the tone of an email. It can also create a meeting invitation from a thread, with the participants and an agenda.

Copilot is a paid add-on to Microsoft 365. According to Microsoft’s price list, a Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licence costs USD 21 per person per month with annual payment; it is intended for companies with up to 300 users. Until 31 December 2026 there is a promotional price of USD 18, and the licence for large companies (Microsoft 365 Copilot) costs USD 30. The Business version does not require E3 or E5 plans – it works with the Business Basic, Standard and Premium plans.

Copilot also has limitations. It does not work on signed and encrypted messages, and a draft must always be read before it is sent. Buy it first for the people who write the most emails, and after a month check the usage reports to see whether they are using it.

Rules move emails between folders. Power Automate can do more with an email: save an attachment, create a task or notify the team. Connectors for Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Excel are standard, so they do not need an additional licence.

Typical uses look like this. An email to the complaints mailbox creates an entry in a SharePoint list and a notification in a Teams channel. Attachments from a selected customer are saved to that customer’s folder. An email from an important customer that no one has answered within a day is escalated to the manager.

A connection to a system outside Microsoft, such as an external CRM, usually requires a Power Automate Premium plan. With invoices, remember KSeF: you download domestic purchase invoices from the system as data. Reading PDFs from emails now only applies to foreign invoices and documents outside KSeF.

The biggest time losses are not in personal mailboxes but in shared ones: orders, the front office, complaints. There, several people read the same messages and no one knows who is dealing with them.

For such a mailbox, first agree the rules: who assigns matters, how quickly we reply and how we mark emails that have been dealt with. Then add automation, such as categories by subject and a reminder about unanswered emails. When there are a lot of requests, consider moving them into a ticketing system or a SharePoint list.

Email automation is simple, so it is easy to overdo it. These are the most common mistakes: