How to open attachment(s) to an email and analyze the image (.jpg, .pdf, .png, etc) for data elements from copilot

Hill, Brian E 0 Reputation points
2026-10-01T14:53:31.8833333+00:00

copilot prompt appears to be able to open and analyze attachments from a single email in a designated folder, but when attempting to process prompt against all emails in an email folder, getting unable to access binary file to allow for analysis.

Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft 365 Copilot | Development
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  1. Sayali-MSFT 6,486 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2026-10-05T07:13:49.3133333+00:00

    Hello Hill, Brian E,
    This looks like a limitation with how Copilot handles attachments at folder scope. When working with a single email, the attachment can be passed directly into the Copilot context, but querying across an entire mail folder doesn’t necessarily retrieve/download each binary attachment (.jpg, .png, .pdf, etc.) for analysis.

    For bulk processing, a more reliable approach would be to use a workflow to iterate through the emails, retrieve each attachment explicitly, extract the content using OCR/document processing if needed, and then pass the extracted text/data to Copilot for analysis. Simply passing Base64/contentBytes may not make the attachment available to the model as an actual image/file input.

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