Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Unable to move processed Outlook emails to archive folder in Power Automate Desktop

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a Power Automate Desktop flow that processes emails from Outlook Desktop.

After each email is processed or sent, I need to move it to an archive folder (PST) because my main mailbox has limited capacity.

I tried using Outlook rules and auto-archive, but the minimum period allowed is 1 day — I need this to happen every few hours instead.

To retrieve the emails, I’m using the following action successfully:

Outlook.RetrieveEmailMessages.RetrieveEmails
Instance: OutlookInstance
Account: 'masked_account@domain.com'
MailFolder: 'TestFolder'
EmailsToRetrieve: Outlook.RetrieveMessagesMode.All
MarkAsRead: True
ReadBodyAsHtml: False
Messages => RetrievedEmails

The issue is that **the PST archive folders are not visible** when I access Outlook with this account.
I can only see them if, in the *Account* parameter, I specify the **PST file name** instead.

When I try to move the processed emails using:

Outlook.ProcessEmailMessages.MoveEmails
Instance: OutlookInstance
Account: 'masked_account@domain.com'
EmailsToProcess: RetrievedEmails
MailFolder: 'D:\\Path\\To\\File\\archive_file1.pst'

I get an error, since the PST archive is considered a different account from the main mailbox I used to retrieve the messages.

Expected behavior:

Be able to move processed emails to a folder inside a local PST archive, even if the archive belongs to a different account than the one used to retrieve the emails.

Actual behavior:

The action fails when trying to move messages to a folder that belongs to a PST archive file (different account). It seems Power Automate Desktop does not support cross-account moves between the main mailbox and local PST archives.