Auto Forward Emails to Airtable with Outlook

Looking for solutions to auto forward and save emails from Gmail? Read more here.

Airtable is a popular low-code tool to build workflows and collaborate with others. Even though Airtable looks like a tabular data tool, it excels in functionality over Google Sheet and Excel. It offers great flexibility with different built in data types and ability to use extensions to create your own workflows, but it does lack one crucial feature: the ability to easily save emails to your Airtable tables.

TaskRobin is an integration service that we have built to help you save emails to Airtable. Simply forward your emails to a private robot inbox and all your email information such as attachments, message content, subject, sender, cc, timestamp etc will all be saved to your Airtable table as a new entry (a new row)! All the email content will be directly made available in Airtable so you won’t need to search for that original email in order to download its attachments.

What’s even better is that you can even automate email saving with your Outlook rules. Then, all the important emails will land into your Airtable base without you even lifting a finger.

Since TaskRobin uploads all your forwarded emails to your Airtable base, we will need to create Outlook email rules to automatically forward incoming emails to your TaskRobin private inbox. If you are a more advanced Outlook user, you can even set up different email rules based on the sender or keywords in the subject line to automatically save selected incoming emails to different Airtable bases. If you wish to save emails to more than one Airtable base, you will need to set up additional Airtable integrations with our web dashboard.

In this article, we are going to teach you step by step how to set up Outlook rules to automatically forward all inbound emails to your Airtable base via TaskRobin.

Set up TaskRobin and link your Airtable base

Firstly, sign up for a trial TaskRobin account on our website and link your Airtable. Or add our official Airtable extension to your Airtable base. The onboarding steps are fairly easy to follow and should you need more help, we are just a live chat away.

Once you have successfully linked TaskRobin to your Airtable account, you should see your Airtable integration in the “Integrations” tab of your TaskRobin web dashboard. If you are using our Airtable extension, you will see that a new integration has been added on the extension page.

A TaskRobin robot email inbox, e.g. airtable@taskrobin.io or any TaskRobin email address you decide to create during the onboarding, will also be ready just for you.

Configure Outlook to auto forward emails to TaskRobin

Next, we will configure your Outlook settings to have all new emails saved to Airtable automatically.

Step 1. On Outlook web version, click the gears icon on the top right to open the Settings panel.

Step 2. Click “View all Outlook settings”. This should open up a new pop up that shows additional settings options.

Step 3. In the settings pop up, navigate to “Mail“ → “Forwarding”

• In Outlook Classic web version, try “Mail” → “Accounts” → “Forwarding”

Step 4. To turn on forwarding, select Enable forwarding, enter the TaskRobin private robot email address, and select Save

• In Outlook Classic web version, select “Start forwarding”

Step 5(Optional). Select the Keep a copy of forwarded messages check box if you want a copy of the original message to remain in your mailbox. Otherwise, all incoming messages will be redirectly to TaskRobin immediately and they won’t show up in your Outlook inbox.

Error: automatic rejection email with “Your organization does not allow external forwarding”

If you are receiving automated error message that says “Your organization does not allow external forwarding”, you have to log in as an Outlook administrator to enable that for your organisation before you can automatically forward emails to an external email address.

This document from Microsoft 365 shows you how to allow automated forwarding from Outlook to TaskRobin by changing the admin settings.

Conclusion

Hope that wasn’t too much information! You now have auto forwarding setup and this will help you forward all your incoming Outlook emails to Airtable via TaskRobin while keeping a copy in your Outlook inbox as well. If you are looking to only automatically forward some emails based on certain criteria, you should look into Outlook email rules to create additional conditions and auto forwarding actions.