Send Email to a direct address in a Flow (without Account, Contact record)

When we work with Dataverse, we use Cloud Flows/ Power Automates to send Email nowadays. Usually, we send a emails to an address associated to a Contact, Account or few other specified entity types records. How about if we need to send an email to a outside Email address which is not associated to any record. It is possible to do as below.

We need three different components here in below sequence. As explained by respective names they are to Initiate, Update and sending the Email.

1) Initiate Email

    Just initiate a Email record using Add a new row action.

2) Update Email

   Then use a Update a row action to populate below details. While passing the already initiated email to Row Id, it is needed to pass same activity Id for bind details of email.     

3) Perform a bound action

    Now its a matter of Sending the email calling SendEmail action in Perform a bound action. 

A way to process more than 5000 records in Cloud Flow execution

If you need to process a large number of records, for example in Dataverse, what we really do is create a scheduled Cloud Flow/ Power Automate. If the process is complex, we can encapsulate the logic in a Custom API and call from Cloud Flow. 

To fetch the records to process, you need to use List Rows operation of Dataverse Connector which returns only 5000 records as once. This is a limitation. In order to overcome this, we need to do below trick.

1) Introduce a Boolean Variable

2) Create a Do Until loop to run until this variable is False

3) Inside the Loop

    - Create List Rows operation to retrieve records

    - Set Variable to True as far as List Rows returns none zero records

4) Add a For Each control to call a Bound Operation against each record in the batch.

Caution

1) List Rows fetch should contains a specific condition for the records being fetched. (perhaps a flag)

2) Within the Custom API it is important to change this flag value once its processed either its successful or failure. 

This way, any record, once processed is omitted in next fetch resulting only one processing per a given record. Otherwise, this will go to an infinite loop which could cause issues. 

Anyway, Cloud flows can handle badly designed loops and it will anyway stop at default maximum number of loops.. still this should be avoided.