Summary

This post covers how to create a VIP notification for emails on Android with Outlook Mobile.

VIP notifications is available with Gmail (and iOS Mail) that allow notification customization when emails arrive from very important people (VIP). This is convenient when preferring silence, except for VIPs. Unfortunately, it is not available in Outlook on Android at this time. In Android, turning on the Notification feature, ‘Do not disturb’, will cause all notifications to be silent, but it has exceptions for certain types such as calls and text messages. The text message exception will be used for this solution by identifying emails from VIPs and then sending a text message that allows the notification to break through ‘Do not disturb’.

Prerequisites

• Android
• Outlook Mobile
• Office 365 – Exchange Online
• Office 365 – Power Automate
• Wireless Carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.)

Description

To begin the solution it helps to start with a baseline on how emails are send to the mobile device to identify integration points.

Outlook Mobile receives all emails from a mail server and although there may be other systems in use before the VIP email arrives to the mail server, we only have two (2) direct integration points; (1) Mail Server and (2) Android Device w/ Outlook Mobile.

For VIP notifications to break through ‘Do not disturb’ the following text message process will need to happen.

Android receives all text messages from a wireless carrier and similar to emails there may be other systems in use before the VIP message arrives to our Wireless Carrier, but we only have (2) direct integration points; (1) Wireless Carrier and (2) Android Device w/ Messages.

With the email and text message flows as a baseline, we can define a conceptual integration between the two (2) processes and their subsystems. As the process starts with an email, we need a solution that can check a condition if the email is received from a VIP sender and if true, send a text message to our device. This solution can be conceptualized by bringing the baseline flows together with a workflow.

The conceptual design introduces a couple of new subsystems in the process, (a) Mail Event Receiver and (b) Workflow. The purpose of the Mail Event Receiver is to watch for incoming emails and initiate the Workflow subsystem. The workflow will then be responsible for the conditional check to see if the email sender is on the VIP list and if true send the email and/or message to the device via the Wireless Carrier.

The workflow subsystem is the integration hub between the mail server and the wireless carrier. We can use no-code / low-code workflow tools for these type of subsystem integrations. A great tool for this purpose is IFTTT (IF This Then That) which comes with connectors to various subsystems. For the purposes of this post, we will cover a similar tool called Power Automate with integration to Exchange Online acting as the mail server. For the mail event receiver between Exchange Online and Power Automate, we will indirectly be using a Graph subsystem that both Exchange Online and Power Automate is integrated with to complete the mail server to workflow integration.

That covers the input to the workflow, so lets turn to the workflow output and its integration to the Wireless Carrier. Most carriers support the ability to send emails as text messages through the use of the wireless phone number as the recipient on the carrier’s mail server (aka realm). This means we can send text messages to ourselves via emails by using the notation <my.phone.number>@<wireless.carrier.realm>. This is supported by multiple carriers including the following US carriers:

Wireless Carrier	Email Recipient
Verizon	5551234567@vtext.com
AT&T	5551234567@txt.att.com
T-Mobile	5551234567@tmomail.com

Plugging in the identified solutions for each subsystem creates a completed logical design that we can implement.

Note; variations can be made to this design such as substituting Exchange Online with a different mail server and Power Automate with IFTTT.

Next we’ll cover the steps for creating the workflow condition using Power Automate.

Steps

1. In a browser, navigate to Power Automate and login with an Office 365 account.

2. On the navigation menu, select “My Flows”, “New”, “Automated – from blank”

3. Enter a Flow name, such as “VIP Notify”

4. Type “Email” in the flow trigger search box and select the trigger “When a new email arrives (V3)”

5. Select “Create” and a workflow canvas should appear with a trigger step.

6. Click the trigger step titled “When a new email arrives (V3)” and it should expand to see all configuration options.

7. In the ‘From’ field, enter the sender email of the VIP person. Multiple sender emails can be entered by adding a semi-colon (;) between each sender.

8. Select “+ New step” at the bottom of the workflow canvas to enter a new step.

9. Search and select the action titled “Send an email (V2)”

10. Click the step titled “Send an email (V2)” and it should expand to see all configuration options.

11. In the ‘To’ field, enter your wireless carrier email address using the <phone.number>@<wireless.carrier.realm> notation to send an email as a text message to yourself.

12. In the ‘Subject’ field, enter a description that identifies the text message, such as “VIP Email Received”

13. In the ‘Body’ field, enter a description for the text message, such as “Check email for details”.

14. Select the ‘Save’ button on the workflow canvas to save the workflow.

15. The VIP Notify workflow is now configured and should be active if the Status field displays ‘On’

16. If the VIP sender list needs to be updated, return to this ‘VIP Notify’ flow and select ‘Edit’ to return to the canvas and repeat step 7 for adding or removing VIP sender emails in the ‘From’ field.

Next Steps

• In the configuration of “Send an Email (V2)” step 12 & step 13, additional information can be added to the Subject and/or Body fields for the text message. For example, the Subject could include a dynamic field that contains the ‘Sender’ or ‘Subject’ of the email that triggered the workflow. This would provide specific details in the text message of which VIP and subject was received without having to check emails.