Overview

Inbound email

Receive email at any address on a subdomain of your verified domain, get an email.received webhook, and fetch the full message with the API.

Updated Oct 1, 2026

Inbound email lets your application receive messages, not only send them. You point an MX record for a subdomain such as inbound.acme.com at Emailit, and every message sent to any address on that subdomain is stored in your workspace and announced with a webhook. Use it for reply handling, support inboxes, parsing documents out of emails, or forwarding mail to a team.

How it works

You publish one MX record. The record for inbound.<your domain> points to inbound.emailitmail.com with priority 10. The MX records on your root domain stay with your mailbox provider, so your normal mail keeps working.
Someone emails an address on that subdomain. Every local part is accepted, for example support@inbound.acme.com or reply+4821@inbound.acme.com. There are no mailboxes to create.
Emailit accepts and stores the message. It’s saved as an email with type inbound and status received, and costs 1 credit.
Emailit creates an email.received event. Webhooks subscribed to it receive a small payload with the email ID, from, to, subject and created_at. The body and attachments aren’t in the webhook.
Your app fetches the content. Call Retrieve an email with the ID to get the parsed text and HTML body, headers and attachments, or Retrieve raw MIME for the original message.
Optionally, an automation acts on it. The Email received trigger in Automations can forward the message or start other steps.

Received messages also appear in the dashboard under Email APIEmails on the Incoming tab, where you can open each one to see its headers, content and attachments.

What you can do

Set up inbound

Publish the MX record, choose the subdomain and send a test message.

Process with webhooks

Verify the webhook, fetch the message and handle attachments in Node.js, Python or PHP.

Forward with automations

Forward every received email, or only some, to another address without code.

Inbound quickstart

Receive your first email in a few minutes.

Limits and behavior

Item	Behavior
Domain	The domain must be a verified sending domain in your workspace (SPF, DKIM and return path records OK).
Addresses	Any address at `<inbound subdomain>.<your domain>`. The default subdomain is `inbound`; you can change it with the API. Addresses on the root domain aren’t accepted.
Message size	Up to 40 MB per message, the same limit as SMTP sending.
Cost	1 credit per received message. If the workspace has no credits, Emailit answers `452 Insufficient credits to receive inbound email` and the sending server retries later.
Webhook payload	`email.received` carries only the ID and envelope fields. Fetch the body, headers and attachments with the API.
Spam filtering	Emailit doesn’t score or filter inbound messages for spam. Apply your own checks before acting on content.
Analytics	Inbound messages aren’t counted in Analytics, which covers outgoing email.

There’s no routing interface for inbound mail: no per-address mailboxes, rules or catch-all settings in the dashboard. Route messages in your own code by reading the to address in the webhook, or use the Forward received email automation to send everything, or a filtered subset, to another inbox.

Retention

Inbound messages follow your workspace’s data retention. Message contents (body, headers and attachments) are kept for a shorter time than the message record, so fetch and store what you need when the webhook arrives. After contents are purged, the API returns the email without its body or attachments.

	Pay as you go	Pro	Business	Custom
Message contents kept	7 days	30 days	30 days	Flexible
Message activity kept	30 days	365 days	365 days	Flexible

Next steps

Set up inbound

Webhook event types