Flow Issues – Let’s Pretend It Didn’t Happen

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I had a client contact me with a weird issue. They receive e-mails which are generated by a Power Automate Flow, suddenly, around August 5-7th 2024, when they use the ‘Reply’ or ‘Reply All’ buttons it doesn’t offer up the recipients e-mail address, but rather their own?!

Ok, let’s rewind for just one moment to put things into context. This Flow has been in place for a number of years and hasn’t been edited for over 2 years. So I was 100% certain it wasn’t anything I had done!

To say I was perplexed was an understatement.

My client fired over a couple examples of the e-mails. From these, I was able to determine that for whatever the reason, now, Flow was no longer including the ‘Reply-To:’ header in the e-mails.

Now, why would this be. Had Microsoft changed the Flow Action? So I delved into the Flow. Nope, the Send an email (V2) action still had the ‘Reply To’ parameter and it was still properly configured (I knew that because the value was also used elsewhere and was working there perfectly).

So, now I knew it was a Microsoft issue! Some update they made had broken things, but what to do. Getting any form of help or support from Microsoft nowadays is simply impossible. This is a major business tool, the impacts of this small issue was actually huge as this Flow processed 100s or 1000s of e-mails a day. Now they had to lookup e-mail addresses and copy/paste in every instance.

I Googled and had no luck. So I posted a question in the Power Automate forum and am still waiting for any form of a reply.

That said, I continued to dig and eventually found a thread on the subject:

Send an email (V2) "reply to" function stopped working
have a simple flow built which takes the answers from a Microsoft Form and puts it into an email to another inbox. I use the advanced option to "Reply to" and include in this the dymanic email address provided by the person who has submitted the form to ensure emails flow between the submitter and the inbox (rather than myself as the flow builder).

This has been working perfectly up until somewhere between the 3 and 5 August where now the "reply to" action is not followed.

 

In it I found the information I was seeking posted by ekim and taken from the Service health – Microsoft 365 admin center:

Some users’ Microsoft Power Automate workflows with email replies configured may be unable to send email messages
Issue ID: MF860777
Affected services: Microsoft Power Automate in Microsoft 365
Status: Service degradation
Issue type: Advisory
Start time: Aug 13, 2024, 6:54 PM GMT+1

User impact
Users’ Microsoft Power Automate workflows with email replies configured may be unable to send email messages.

More info
This issue is specific to workflows that leverage Microsoft Graph API and use “replyTo” in the “/sendMail” function.

Scope of impact
Some users’ Microsoft Power Automate workflows with email replies configured that leverage Microsoft Graph API and use “replyTo” in the”/sendMail” function may be impacted.

Root cause
A recent service update to Microsoft Graph API contains a code regression that is preventing the “/replyTo” feature from functioning properly and resulting in impact.

Current status
Aug 14, 2024, 1:31 AM GMT+1
We’ve developed a code fix to address the specific portion of offending code within the recent update, which is undergoing testing and validation to ensure it will resolve the impact. Once this process is complete, we’ll begin deploying it to the affected environments. We expect the fix will take one week to reach full saturation in the affected environments.

Next update by:
Wednesday, August 21, 2024 at 2:30 AM GMT+1

 
What floors me in all of this is:

  1. People are reporting this still as of August 16th, 2024.  That means 2 weeks in and it still hasn’t been resolved!
  2. When I log into my Flow portal there is no notification of any issues.
  3. When I edit a Flow that uses that specific parameter there is no notification.
  4. No notification was ever sent to admins to notify them of this issue.

Microsoft seem to be the ostrich trying to put its head in the sand rather than advising its clients, acted responsibly, it appears IMHO to have hoped that no one would notice.

This also, once again highlights the inadequate internal testing Microsoft does on all of its products before production launch!

How exactly does it take 2 weeks to fix this type of issue!?

At the very least, a simply notification in the Flow portal, the flow itself, an e-mail to admins that use that parameters in their flows, … would have saved many a souls hours of frustrations and searching/troubleshooting an issue that was never theirs in the first place.

So all in all, not a good week for Flow, 2 Major problems in 1 week! And Microsoft wants us to build mission critical business systems on such unreliable architecture. Come on.