Accessing Office365 emails - recommended node

Questions
1

I am investigating potentially using N8N, to replace Make which I run for a small number of important scenarios. All are triggered by incoming emails, delivered to a shared Office365 business mailbox. I am unclear on which node would best serve my needs if I switch to N8N.

I have seen references to nodes for Outlook, SMTP, Microsoft Graph, etc but important caveats seem to exist for each (a suggestion to disable SSL, access to shared mailboxes, scope of functionality, etc). Also, many comments I have read are rather old, so it’s not easy to discover the current state of play.

My needs are as follows:

  • Trigger automations based on receipt of emails with a certain subject line, in a shared mailbox (I would obviously prefer this to somehow be triggered by the Office365 platform, but if I need to regularly poll that’s acceptable for these scenarios).

  • Ability to open and parse email contents, extracting and process the body of the email (specifically, iterating through embedded HTML tables)

  • Ability to move triggering emails out of the inbox of the shared inbox and into a different folder, after they have been processed.

  • Needs to be “secure”, at least to the extent email can ever truly be (I am thinking here about the potential suggestion to disable SSL that I read here in various placed - I’d like to understand that better).

The Outlook node seems like it could potentially be what I need (though it’s poorly named - my scenarios do not use “Outlook” at all).

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi @markw, I would go with the Outlook node as it uses the approach suggested by MS to connect to their inboxes. It doesn’t have a trigger functionality, but you could easily combine the Outlook node with a Cron node to fetch new messages in regular intervals.

3

Thank you for the response, @MutedJam. I’d like to clarify one aspect of this.

I think I understand the point, in relation to the Outlook vs. SMTP nodes. But what about Microsoft Graph? That seems like a rich and flexible approach and, as far as I am aware, a current and fully supported API.

Does the approach suggested by Microsoft to which you refer (which I haven’t read, so I am not familiar), imply the Outlook node would be a more suitable approach for accessing mail, as compared to using the Microsoft Graph API?

I agree on the final point - triggers would be great (as far as I am aware, Microsoft Graph supports this via notification subscriptions) would be preferred but polling via CRON would probably be OK for this use case.

Thank you again.

4

Hey @markw, I mostly suggested the Outlook node because it’s purpose-built to interact with your MS365 emails. It would still use the MS Graph API under the hood.

You can still consume the API directly if you prefer, this could be done using the generic HTTP Request node for example.

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