CoPilot - Identifying the selected email in Outlook or Email attached as a file in CoPilot App

Question

CoPilot - Identifying the selected email in Outlook or Email attached as a file in CoPilot App

Cory Zaruba 0

I'm building out a custom Agent currently in CoPilot Studio that hinges on being able to identify the email selected in Outlook through CoPilot as well as dragging/dropping the email into the CoPilot application then asking CoPilot with the agent loaded to do something with the email like "Attach to CRM Record" or "Create a record in CRM".

The problem I'm facing is CoPilot doesn't seem to be able to do this with email files (or any others best I can tell, but I'm early in the learning process), am I missing something or is this most basic function really absent?

Any help is appreciated.

Prasad-MSFT 10,546 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-28T05:18:53.28+00:00

You're not missing anything — the limitation is that Copilot Studio doesn't automatically receive the Outlook email you've currently selected as a rich email object.

The solution is to use an Outlook-side integration (typically an Outlook add-in or Microsoft 365/Graph integration) to capture the selected email's ID, then pass that ID into your Copilot/Power Automate flow. From there, you can retrieve the actual email and attachments and use your CRM connector/API to create or attach the CRM record.

Select email in Outlook → capture Message ID → Copilot/Flow → retrieve email + attachments → CRM

Your answer

Prasad-MSFT 10,546 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-28T05:18:53.28+00:00

You're not missing anything — the limitation is that Copilot Studio doesn't automatically receive the Outlook email you've currently selected as a rich email object.

The solution is to use an Outlook-side integration (typically an Outlook add-in or Microsoft 365/Graph integration) to capture the selected email's ID, then pass that ID into your Copilot/Power Automate flow. From there, you can retrieve the actual email and attachments and use your CRM connector/API to create or attach the CRM record.

Select email in Outlook → capture Message ID → Copilot/Flow → retrieve email + attachments → CRM