A developer's guide to receiving and processing incoming emails in your application.
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.
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.
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.
Email attachments can be embedded inline, base64 encoded, use different content types, or be nested within forwarded messages. Extracting them reliably is non-trivial.
Developers typically choose between two methods to receive inbound email. Each has trade-offs.
Connect to a mailbox and periodically check for new messages.
Receive emails as HTTP POST requests with structured JSON.
For most applications, converting email to webhooks is the simpler and more reliable approach. Read our detailed comparison →
Mailhooks provides an inbound email API that handles the infrastructure and parsing for you.
Create an inbox with a unique email address. Use our domains or connect your own.
Point to your endpoint URL. We'll send a POST request for every email.
Every email is parsed into clean JSON with headers, body, and attachment URLs.
Let users respond to notifications from their inbox.
Trigger workflows the moment an email arrives.
Test email flows in Playwright and Cypress.
Receive and parse inbound email through a REST API.
Receive inbound email as real-time HTTP webhooks.