Powershell Search Outlook Email By Title and Extract Most Recent Excel (.xls) File - excel

Question

I am an intern at a testing organisation.
I am trying to automate a very long task and I'm using Powershell to do most of the work.
Task:
We have a corporate email and we receive a LOT of emails during the day. Of course, we have rules set up to make our lives a little more bearable.
Every day there are specific emails being sent to a folder "XYZ" and I want to search for the most recent email using the following criteria:
- Email Title
- Latest Email which contains the search string
Every one of those emails contains an Excel file. If the title of the body matches search criteria, I want to download the latest attachment. Unless there is a way to open and parse the file without downloading it.
I'm super new to Powershell but I have a programming background, so don't be pushed back to simplify yourselves down.
Best regards,
Alex

Answer 1

You'll need to do most of this yourself, but this is code from a similar script I have, i've broken it down to make it a bit more readable, should hopefully get you started.
#Params
$Account = "Mailbox.Searchme#contoso.com"
$Folder = "Inbox"
$SubjMatch = "Reports"
#Create outlook COM object to search folders
$Outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
$OutlookNS = $Outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")
#Get all emails from specific account and folder
$AllEmails = $OutlookNS.Folders.Item($Account).Folders.Item($Folder).Items
#Filter to emails with attatchments and specific subject line (-match uses RegEx)
$ReportsEmails = $AllEmails | ? { ($_.Subject -match $SubjMatch) -and ($_.Attachements.Count -gt 0) }
#Grab the most recently recieved email
$LatestReportEmail = $ReportsEmails | Sort ReceivedTime | Select -Last 1
#Get the xlsx file(s) and save them
$LatestReportEmail.Attachments | ? {$_.FileName -match "\.xlsx$"} | % {
$_.SaveAsFile("C:\path\to\$($_.FileName)")
}
#Quit Outlook COM Object
$Outlook.Quit()
you should have Outlook closed before you try and run this, also this can be EXTREMELY slow on big folders (mostly the filter part for some reason), good luck.