do you find yourself responding to work emails after hours unless your job is to save the world those emails can probably wait until tomorrow set some boundaries with automated email responses this Microsoft power automate flow will auto reply to any emails that arrive in your inbox outside of your working hours the flow will move those emails into a separate folder so you can tackle them when you're back on the clock if you're interested in learning how to set boundaries and create this automation keep watching in power automate I'm going to create a new instant Cloud flow we're going to start by triggering this flow manually this will make it easy to test and troubleshoot the flow before using the automated trigger this step is optional you can use the dynamic content timestamp from the manually trigger of flow action if you prefer for this tutorial I want to mimic the receive date and time of an email to demonstrate how the flow Works to do this we'll use two inputs in the manually trigger a flow action one is for the date and one is for the time the time should be in 24 hour format I'll use a text input for that next insert a compose action I'll use this compose action to format the date and time to look like a timestamp if you're using the dynamic content timestamp you can insert it here first I'll join the date and time together insert a concat expression insert the date input add a comma single quotes a capital T place your cursor outside of the last single quote add another comma insert the time input add another comma single quotes a colon and two zeros next wrap the concat expression in a format date time expression place your cursor inside the format date time expression and add a comma single quotes insert the iso 8601 date and time format Outlook stores the received time of emails in UTC format to mimic that I'll wrap the format date time expression in an add hours expression place your cursor inside the add hours expression add a comma and enter the number of hours to offset the UTC time based on your local time zone in my case I'll add a 7. adding scope actions to this flow is optional I'll be using it to help group different actions together I'll use a first scope action to group all the actions for the date and time the email was received add a convert Time Zone Action I'll use this action to convert the output of the compose action above currently it's storing the mimic timestamp yours may be storing the timestamp the flow was triggered later we'll replace this with the receive time of the email in the base time field insert the output from the compose action above or the source time zone search for coordinated universal time for the destination time zone select your local time zone for the format string select round trip next add a compose action I'll use this action to hold the day of the week from the output of the convert Time Zone Action insert a day of week expression insert the converted time here add another compose action I'll use this action to hold the time from the output of the convert Time Zone Action insert a format date time expression insert the converted time here add a comma single quotes enter Capital HH a colon and lowercase mm at a scope action I'll use this scope action to group my work start and end times you can customize this to suit your needs remember to enter your times in 24 hour or military format add a condition I'll add a condition action to check whether the received email Falls within my working hours to do this I'll create two groups within the condition action the first group will check whether the received email Falls within my working days Monday to Friday I'll use the output from the receive day of week compose action which returns a number representing the day of week Monday equals one Tuesday equals 2 and so on first I'll add a group and I'll move this first row down I'll add the output from the received day of week compose action select is greater than or equal to and insert one for Monday I'll insert the output from the received day of week compose action select is less than or equal to and insert 5 for Friday I'll make sure that the group uses an and condition and that each row is selected add another group this group will check whether the received email Falls within my working hours which are between 7 AM and 5 pm I'll add the output from the receive time compose action select is greater than or equal to and insert the output from the work start compose action add a row and insert the output from the receive time compose action select is less than or equal to and insert the output from the work and compose action that's it if the receive time Falls within working hours the condition will be true if not the condition will be false Let's test it out first I'll select a date and insert a time to mimic an email being received outside of working hours the result of the condition is false this means that the receive time Falls outside of working hours let's run one more test I'll select a date and insert a time to mimic an email being received within working hours the result of the condition is true this means that the received time Falls within working hours now that I've tested the flow to ensure the condition action works I'm ready to replace the manual trigger with an automated trigger delete the manual trigger search for when new email arrives I'll be using version 3. here you can specify whether or not you'd like to trigger this flow if an email arrives in a specific folder by expanding the advanced options you can also choose to only trigger the flow when an email comes from a specific sender has certain keywords in the subject or is marked with a specific level of importance in the compose action below I'll delete this expression and add the receive time from the action above since the rest of my actions relied on the output of this compose action I don't need to make any additional changes to my flow before we go any further I'll send a test email to myself in this compose action the receive date time is in UTC format this action has converted the receive date time from UTC into my local time zone and the result of this condition is false meaning that this email has been received outside of working hours if the emails received within working hours no action needs to be taken if the emails received outside of working hours I'd like to send an automated reply I'll add a reply to email B3 action search for message ID and insert it here I'm going to copy and paste some email content here the next few actions are optional after I've replied to an email I want to move it into a specific folder and Mark it as unread alternatively you can leave the email in whichever folder it arrived in I'll add a move email V2 action search for the message ID and insert it here select the folder you'd like to move the message to when this action is used the email is marked as read by default add a mark As read or unread V3 action insert the message ID here in the mark As drop down select no in Outlook I just received the email the reply has been sent and it's been moved into the specified folder I'll right click on my folder and I'll add it to my favorites this way it appears the top of my sidebar in Outlook what other Outlook email automations are you looking to create let me know in the comments down below if you plan to set boundaries by creating this power automate flow please consider giving this video a like don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any new outlook automation tutorials thanks for watching