Most EASA Form 1 certificates reach a receiving desk or a broker as an Outlook attachment, often forwarded twice, sometimes scanned at 150 dpi. Getting the boxes out of that attachment takes two steps: get a clean file out of Outlook, then send it to an extractor.
TL;DR. Two routes work today. Save the attachment and send it to Doana from ChatGPT or Claude, or have your own agent read the mailbox through Microsoft Graph and call Doana's extract_easa_form1 tool over MCP. Doana has no Outlook add-in and does not watch a mailbox for certificates. Common failures come from the attachment itself: TIFF scans, certificates buried in a forwarded .msg, or one PDF holding five certificates.
Route 1: from Outlook to ChatGPT or Claude
For a person handling a few certificates a day.
- Save the attachment from Outlook. If it sits inside a forwarded message (.msg or .eml), open that message and save the PDF itself.
- In ChatGPT or Claude, with the Doana connector enabled, attach the file and ask for the extraction in the same message.
- Read the item rows and the
uncertainFieldslist. Check those values against the certificate. - Write the
job_idagainst the receiving record before closing the conversation.
The setup is in How to extract an EASA Form 1 with ChatGPT. A personal account covers five EASA Form 1 files per UTC week.
Route 2: your own agent reads the mailbox
For a team that wants certificates processed as they arrive. Your agent (a Microsoft Graph subscription, a Power Automate flow calling your own service, or a custom worker) finds the attachment and sends it to Doana:
- Files up to 64 KiB can go inline as
content_base64. - Larger files go through
create_mcp_upload: PUT the bytes to the returnedupload_url, then callextract_easa_form1with theupload_id. - Poll
get_extraction_resultwith thejob_iduntil the status settles, and store the result next to the email.
The contract, authentication and limits are on the EASA Form 1 API page. The endpoint is MCP with OAuth, not a REST upload URL.
Which attachments fail?
| Attachment | What happens | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| TIFF from a scanner or fax gateway | Rejected as UNSUPPORTED_FILE_TYPE | Export to PDF, JPEG or PNG |
| Certificate inside a forwarded .msg | The extractor never sees it | Save the inner PDF |
| One PDF with invoice, packing list and Form 1 | Over 20 pages is rejected; under that, extra pages add noise | Send only the Form 1 pages |
| Several certificates merged into one PDF | One header is returned for the file | One certificate per file |
| Phone photo, cropped or skewed | May come back unknown if the form cannot be identified | Rescan flat, full page |
| 8130-3 or TCCA Form One | documentType: unknown | Extracted in a custom pipeline, not self-serve |
What Doana does not do in Outlook
It does not install an Outlook add-in, scan a shared mailbox for certificates, or reply to the supplier. Those are jobs for your own agent or for a person. What Doana returns is the Form 1 itself as structured data: boxes 1 to 14, one record per item line, a confidence score and page on every value.
If your shared mailbox is the bottleneck more than the certificate, see the Outlook shared mailbox article and the AOG email triage page.
Next
Start with Route 1 on a week of real certificates. Count how many attachments needed a fix before extraction. That count tells you whether an automated Route 2 is worth building.
Sources
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/fileattachment
- https://doana.ca/en/easa-form-1-automation
- https://doana.ca/en/easa-form-1-api
- https://doana.ca/en/mcp/easa-form-1