Email is not triggered for Power Automate Approvals to Microsoft 365 groups.

Power Automate approvals are great and much used. And why not? Afterall they allow users the capability to approve/ reject from their mailboxes and also configure multiple scenarios related to approval process.

When you are working on Approvals, more often than not you need to send email to Office 365 Groups. Think of an invoice approval sent out to finance team or an insurance approval to claims department.

I have created a Office 365 group – Sample Group. And I have used it in the approval flow.

I run the flow. Quite obvious the flow keeps waiting in the approval step. I check the group mailbox but no email show up there.

Ran it multiple times and the same behavior is observed. After much waiting I navigated to the action items in Power Automate portal and I could see the Approval there.

If users are using Power Automate mobile app, they will get the approval notification on their mobile device as well.

Well, this is something you should remember whenever you plan to send an approval email to Office 365 group. Don’t expect emails to trigger. Users can approve from the Power Automate mobile app or from the action items area in Power Automate portal.

The solution so far has not been great! Afterall you can’t expect users to approve from their notification in Power Automate email. What if I need to send it to all the users in the group?

To do this, you can follow the below steps.

1. Create a new string variable.

Then use the “List group members” action of the Office 365 group connector. Specify the group name here. Remember that you can only see groups you are owner of or is a member of.

The next step is to iterate through the members and concatenate the emails to the string variable declared in earlier step.

So now we have all the emails separated by semicolon. And that’s it. We can now use this variable in the Assigned to of the approval action.

A great workaround? Obviously not but something which works.

Hope this helped! You will also like the below posts.

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP