MailcrateReceiving Mail
How mail sent to your workspace arrives, what Mailcrate does with each message, and where you read it.
Mailcrate can receive email as well as send it. Replies to your campaigns, messages to a support address, anything sent to an address your workspace receives on: each one lands in the workspace, is matched to the contact who sent it, and is linked to the email it answers.
Inbound email is an optional feature. Turn it on in Settings → Workspace → Features (Inbound email). Only owners and admins can change features.
Two ways in
Mail reaches your workspace through an inbound address. There are two kinds, and you can use both at once:
| Forwarding address | Dedicated domain | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A generated address such as a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8@inbound.mailcrate.io | Every address at a domain you own, such as anything@inbox.example.com |
| Setup | Add a forwarding rule in your existing mailbox. No DNS changes. | Point the domain's MX record at Mailcrate. |
| Use it when | You want to keep your mailbox provider and send copies of some mail to Mailcrate. | You want a domain whose mail goes to Mailcrate and nowhere else. |
Both deliver into the same place, so everything below applies to either.
What happens to each message
01
Received
Mail arrives on an inbound address.
02
Parsed
Body, attachments and headers are read.
03
Matched
The sender is looked up among your contacts, and the reply is linked to the email it answers.
04
Available
In the Inbound log, on the contact, in journeys, and to your developers.
- The sender is matched to a contact by email address. Mailcrate never creates a contact from inbound mail, so spam cannot fill your audience; a message from an unknown sender is still kept, just without a contact.
- Replies are linked to what they answer. When a message is a reply to an email Mailcrate sent, or to an earlier inbound message, Mailcrate links the two using the reply headers that email clients add. A message that was forwarded or rewritten without those headers stays unlinked; Mailcrate does not guess from the subject line.
- Automatic replies are recognised. Out-of-office and other auto-responders are marked as such, so they never count as a contact replying.
- Spam, virus and DMARC checks run on every message, and the result is shown with it.
- Attachments are stored with the message and can be downloaded.
Read what arrived
Open Inbound in the sidebar. It lists every message received on your forwarding addresses and domains, newest first. Search matches the sender and the subject.
Select a message to read it. Alongside the body you see:
- From, To and Received. When the sender is one of your contacts, the To address links to their contact page. For mail that came through a forwarding address, Originally to shows the address the sender actually wrote to.
- Spam, Virus and DMARC badges with each check's verdict.
- In reply to, linking to the email this message answers: the original delivery when it was a reply to something you sent.
- Attachments, each with a download button, and Download .eml for the complete original message.
- Thread, listing the other sent and received messages in the same conversation.
The Inbound page is a read-only log. You cannot reply, delete or move messages there.
Where else inbound mail shows up
- On the contact. A message from a known contact appears on their Activity timeline as an email received. See Contacts.
- In journeys. A contact replies to an email is a journey trigger, and a journey can wait for a reply before it continues. Automatic replies never fire either. See Triggers.
- For your developers. Every message is available through the API and can be pushed to your systems with the
inbound.parsedwebhook, for example to open a support ticket. Receiving Inbound Mail is their guide. Settings → Mail Setup → Inbound has an example request under Read received email in your application.
Getting replies to your campaigns
People reply to the Reply To address of your email, or to its From address when there is no Reply To. For a reply to reach Mailcrate, that address must be one your workspace receives on:
- Send from a domain that receives inbound. If inbound is enabled on the domain you send from, replies come straight back, with no Reply To needed.
- Or set Reply To on the email to an inbound address, such as a forwarding address or an address at your inbound domain. See Set the sender and subject.
Good to know
- Turning the feature off hides the pages, nothing else. Your addresses keep receiving mail and the log is kept.
- Removing an address stops new mail. Messages already received are kept.
- Raw messages and attachments are kept for 90 days. After that, Download .eml and attachment downloads stop working; the message itself stays in the log.