Remind yourself to follow-up on your emails using Power Automate

Do you recognize the following situation?

You send an email requesting A, B or C. Then, you go do something else. Soon enough, you forget about the email you sent and to which you never received a response. Before you know it, someone else asks about the topic and all of a sudden you remember that you should have followed-up on the topic, which you of course now realize you did not.

It happened to me often enough, that it was a topic I brought up myself in my year-end review. There must be a better way then having to set a reminder in Outlook, is there not? Of course there is! The solution is using Microsoft’s Power Automate.

Alright, down to business. The logic is simple. Whenever I send an email, I want to be able to add a small string of text to the subject which will cause the Flow to run and remind me 2 weeks from today to check whether I got a response. So, let us start by creating a new flow.

We will choose the automated cloud flow. Skip the naming, you can always change it later. Choose as trigger ‘When a new email arrives (V3)’. As folder, we will choose ‘Sent Items’ because we want to trigger this flow when we send an item. In the from field choose your own email. Then, in the ‘Subject Filter’ field, choose a string that will not happen to be in your subject by chance, we don’t want to get reminders for ALL email we send. I have chosen:

[rmndr]

Alright, almost done. Add a ‘Delay’ step, I have chosen 2 weeks but you can choose whatever you want. You can also create several flows with different periods depending on which trigger string you use in the subject line.
Finally, add a ‘Send an email (V2)’ step. I’ve added a subject.
Be careful not to use the original subject! That will trigger an infinite loop of self-activation, the email sent here will also end up in your sent items and if your keyword is present here, it will call itself indefinitely.
In the Body, I wrote a simple message which reminds me to who I sent an email and on what topic. It uses the ‘To’ and ‘Subject’ from the original email. Easy peasy. Here is the full flow:

I have tested the flow using a 5 minute delay instead of 2 weeks.
The trigger email:

A couple of minutes later, the reminder email:

There we are, all done! I hope you will enjoy it as much as I will.