Documentation Communication channels Outlook

Channels integration

Outlook

Outlook integration overview
  • CategoryChannels
  • AuthOAuth

Overview

Outlook connects on /channels/email through Microsoft OAuth. On the four-provider picker (Google, Google Workspace, Outlook, Custom Domain), pick Outlook (Microsoft 365 · Office 365 · Outlook.com). You sign in to Microsoft, authorise MessageMind, and the mailbox is attached to the shared inbox the AI works from. The same form-lead detection that routes website form notifications to the real submitter runs on Outlook mail just like Gmail and custom-domain inboxes.

What MessageMind can do with it

  • Pick the Outlook card on /channels/email and complete Microsoft OAuth to attach any Microsoft 365, Office 365 or Outlook.com mailbox.
  • Add more than one Outlook mailbox from the Add inbox tab, so a team can run several accounts side by side under one tenant.
  • Detect form notifications and open the conversation against the submitter rather than the form service's noreply address.
  • Create the submitter as a contact with the mapped fields before the conversation is opened, so Contact Created automations see the full record.
  • Deduplicate the same form submission when the form copies several mailboxes.
  • Fall back to an AI pass for form notifications the deterministic parser cannot read.

Requirements

  • A Microsoft account with access to the Outlook, Microsoft 365 or Office 365 mailbox you want to connect.
  • Permission to grant Mail access to MessageMind on Microsoft's consent screen. On a Microsoft 365 tenant with admin consent required, an admin may need to approve the MessageMind app first.
  • Browser popup permission for the MessageMind dashboard; the OAuth window opens as a popup.

How to connect

  1. Open MessageMind and go to /channels/email.
  2. On the Connect Email Provider card, pick Outlook (Microsoft 365 · Office 365 · Outlook.com).
  3. The Microsoft OAuth popup opens. Sign in, pick the mailbox, review the requested permissions and click Accept.
  4. The popup closes. MessageMind saves the OAuth tokens, shows a success toast, and the mailbox appears as a tab under the connected inboxes list.
  5. To add another Outlook mailbox, click the Add inbox tab and run the same OAuth flow for the next account.

Authentication and permissions

Mechanism
Microsoft OAuth 2.0 opened in a popup window from the MessageMind dashboard. Works for personal Microsoft accounts (Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live) and work/school accounts (Microsoft 365, Office 365).
Credentials
An OAuth refresh token issued by Microsoft for the connected mailbox, stored on your MessageMind tenant and used server-side to call Microsoft Graph (Mail) and keep the subscription renewed.

Available data and actions

Reads

  • Inbound Outlook messages, including envelope sender, subject, text body and HTML body.
  • Each inbound message's provider id, used to tie the lead ingest row back to the originating email.

Writes

  • A new or updated contact with the submitter's name, email, phone and any other labelled fields the form provided.
  • A conversation thread for the submitter, keyed on the real person rather than on the form service's address.
  • Custom field entries on the contact for every other labelled form field.

AI agent use cases

  • A website quote form emailing an Outlook mailbox becomes a conversation with the actual customer, with their phone and quote details already on their contact.
  • A table-only HTML form notification is still turned into a lead through the AI fallback.
  • The same form submission copied to several mailboxes creates one contact and one thread.

Configuration

  • Owner-specific form handlers can mark incoming leads as contact-only, switch the generic detector off, or decide what happens on a repeat submission by the same person.
  • Placeholder values such as dashes, N/A, Not specified, TBD and To be confirmed are dropped before being written to the contact.
  • A phone the contact creator rejects as invalid is retried once with the raw value saved under a Phone Number custom field.

Example workflows

Form notification routed to the real submitter

  1. A website form emails your Outlook mailbox from a noreply address with the submitter's details written as labelled lines in the body.
  2. MessageMind reads the labelled lines and extracts the submitter's email, name, phone and the other fields.
  3. The lead is handed to the contact creator, which creates (or merges into) the person with their mapped fields.
  4. The conversation thread is opened against the submitter's address.
  5. A copy of the same submission sent to another mailbox is dropped as a duplicate.

Limitations

  • This page documents only what is visible in the inbound-handling code; details of the Microsoft OAuth app, consent screens and token refresh are not covered here.
  • The deterministic form parser needs at least two labelled lines, and a labelled email in the body or a clearly automated sender.
  • The AI fallback for form extraction only runs for automated-looking senders whose body carries a second address.

Troubleshooting

The OAuth popup opens and closes without connecting.

The browser popup was blocked, or you closed it before Microsoft returned the authorisation code. Allow popups for the MessageMind dashboard origin and re-click Outlook on /channels/email.

Microsoft says the app needs admin consent on this tenant.

A Microsoft 365 admin needs to approve the MessageMind app for the tenant (Entra ID, Enterprise applications). Once approved, retry Outlook on /channels/email.

The connection stops receiving mail after a few days.

The Microsoft Graph subscription expired without a successful renewal (common on a long server outage). Reconnect from /channels/email so a fresh OAuth is run; this re-creates the mail subscription.

A form that emails you keeps piling onto the form service's noreply contact.

The form body does not carry a labelled email and the sender is not clearly automated. Make the form include a labelled Email field, or contact support to add an owner-specific handler.

A repeat submission did not update the mapped fields.

The default merge behaviour keeps the existing values. An owner-specific handler can be configured to overwrite mapped fields and rerun Contact Created automations on repeat submissions.

Disconnect and reconnect

  • On /channels/email, pick the Outlook mailbox tab and click Disconnect. MessageMind clears the stored OAuth tokens for that mailbox and shows 'Email disconnected successfully!'. The Microsoft Graph subscription is removed.
  • On Microsoft's side, you can also revoke the MessageMind app at microsoft.com, Account, Privacy, Apps and services that can access your data.
  • To reconnect, run the Outlook OAuth again from /channels/email. Previously received emails already in MessageMind stay in the inbox.