Receive your first inbound email

This quickstart sets up a domain to receive email, so your app can handle replies, support requests or forwarded messages. You’ll add one DNS record, send a test message, and then receive it with a webhook and fetch its full content from the API.

Before you begin

• A verified sending domain, such as acme.com. Inbound email only works on domains that are verified in your workspace. See Add a domain.
• Credits in the workspace. Each received email costs 1 credit.

How inbound addresses work

Emailit receives mail on a subdomain of your sending domain, by default inbound. Any address on that subdomain works, so support@inbound.acme.com and reply-4821@inbound.acme.com both arrive in the same workspace. Your main domain’s MX records, for example for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, stay as they are.

Add the inbound MX record

1. Open the domain. Go to Email API›Domains and open acme.com. The MX record for inbound.acme.com is listed with the other DNS records. It’s optional, so the domain stays verified without it.

2. Add the record at your DNS provider.

   Type	Name	Value	Priority
   MX	inbound.acme.com	inbound.emailitmail.com	10

   Some DNS providers want only inbound in the name field. Others want the full name.

3. Check DNS. Select Check DNS on the domain page and wait until the inbound record shows OK. DNS changes usually take a few minutes, but can take up to 48 hours.

To receive on a different subdomain, such as replies.acme.com, set inbound_key to replies when you create or update the domain with the API, then publish the MX record for that name instead. The dashboard shows the inbound subdomain but doesn’t let you change it.

Send a test email

From your personal mailbox, send an email to any address on the inbound subdomain, for example hello@inbound.acme.com.

Go to Email API›Emails and open the Incoming tab. The message appears with the status received. Open it to see the sender, the headers, the content and any attachments.

If it doesn’t arrive, check that the MX record shows OK and that the domain is verified. If the workspace has no credits left, Emailit refuses the message with a temporary error, and the sender’s server tries again later.

Get notified with a webhook

To process inbound email in your app, subscribe to the email.received event.

1. Create the webhook. Go to Email API›Webhooks, select Add webhook, and enter a name and your HTTPS endpoint, for example https://acme.com/webhooks/emailit. Copy the webhook secret. You need it to verify signatures.

2. Choose the event. A new webhook receives every event. Open the webhook’s Settings tab and select only email.received, or keep all events and filter in your code.

3. Send another test email to hello@inbound.acme.com.

Emailit sends a signed POST to your endpoint. The body is a JSON array, because one request can carry up to 100 events:

[
  {
    "event_id": "evt_2pXb7Lw9QmKc4RtN8yVd3Hs",
    "type": "email.received",
    "data": {
      "object": {
        "id": "em_2pXb7Kq4NvL8mWc3RtB9yZd",
        "object": "email",
        "from": "ada@example.com",
        "to": "hello@inbound.acme.com",
        "subject": "Question about my order",
        "created_at": "2026-10-01T09:30:12.418Z"
      }
    }
  }
]

The event has the sender, the recipient and the subject, but not the body. Verify the X-Emailit-Signature header before you trust the request. See Request signature.

Fetch the full email

Use the id from the event to fetch the message with a Full Access API key:

curl https://api.emailit.com/v2/emails/em_2pXb7Kq4NvL8mWc3RtB9yZd \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMAILIT_API_KEY"

The response includes the parsed headers, the text and HTML body, and the attachments:

{
  "object": "email",
  "id": "em_2pXb7Kq4NvL8mWc3RtB9yZd",
  "type": "inbound",
  "from": "ada@example.com",
  "to": "hello@inbound.acme.com",
  "subject": "Question about my order",
  "status": "received",
  "headers": { "...": "..." },
  "body": {
    "text": "Hi, where is my order #1042?",
    "html": "<p>Hi, where is my order #1042?</p>"
  },
  "attachments": []
}

To get the original message instead, call GET /emails/{id}/raw. Message content is kept for your plan’s retention period, so fetch it soon after the event arrives. See Data retention.

Pricing

Each received email costs 1 credit, the same as sending one. See Credits.

Next steps