Email infrastructure guide
How to Receive Email with an API
Route inbound mail to your application, parse it safely, and make it useful in a product workflow.
Inbound email turns a domain into an application interface. A reliable setup combines MX routing, verified ownership, MIME parsing, storage, and controls for attachments and untrusted content.
What this means in practice
- MX routing for a domain you control
- Inbound message parsing and storage
- A programmatic inbox or webhook workflow
- Attachment and content-safety boundaries
Implementation checklist
- Choose a dedicated inbound domain or subdomain.
- Publish the MX records requested by the routing provider.
- Store raw message metadata before processing content.
- Parse text, HTML, recipients, and attachments defensively.
- Expose a workspace-scoped inbox or webhook to the product.
Questions teams ask
Can an application receive replies by email?
Yes. Route a reply domain to an inbound handler, match recipients or reply tokens, and associate the message with the correct workspace or conversation.
Why store raw inbound metadata?
It preserves an audit trail and lets you reprocess messages if parsing rules change.