What is Inbound Email?
A developer's guide to receiving and processing incoming emails in your application.
Inbound email, explained
Inbound email refers to emails that your application receives, rather than sends. When a user replies to a notification, when a customer sends a support request, or when a system forwards an alert to your app — that's inbound email.
For developers, inbound email means building the infrastructure to receive, parse, and process these incoming messages programmatically.
Why handling inbound email is difficult
You need email infrastructure
Receiving email requires running an SMTP server, configuring DNS (MX records), managing SSL certificates, and ensuring high availability. Most developers don't want to become email infrastructure experts.
MIME parsing is complex
Email messages use MIME format with nested multipart structures, various encodings, and inconsistent formatting across email clients. Parsing this reliably requires handling dozens of edge cases.
Attachments add complexity
Email attachments can be embedded inline, base64 encoded, use different content types, or be nested within forwarded messages. Extracting them reliably is non-trivial.
Two approaches: IMAP polling vs webhooks
Developers typically choose between two methods to receive inbound email. Each has trade-offs.
IMAP Polling
Connect to a mailbox and periodically check for new messages.
- • Introduces latency (polling interval)
- • Requires managing persistent connections
- • Must handle connection drops and reconnects
- • Still need to parse MIME format
- • Scales poorly with multiple mailboxes
Email to Webhook
Receive emails as HTTP POST requests with structured JSON.
- • Instant delivery (real-time)
- • No connections to manage
- • Pre-parsed JSON payload
- • Attachments as downloadable URLs
- • Scales naturally with HTTP
For most applications, converting email to webhooks is the simpler and more reliable approach. Read our detailed comparison →
How Mailhooks simplifies inbound email
Mailhooks provides an inbound email API that handles the infrastructure and parsing for you.
Get an email address instantly
Create an inbox with a unique email address. Use our domains or connect your own.
Configure your webhook
Point to your endpoint URL. We'll send a POST request for every email.
Receive structured JSON
Every email is parsed into clean JSON with headers, body, and attachment URLs.