Understanding Inbound Email in Postmark

Postmark isn’t just for sending email—you can also use it to receive email into your system. This is called Inbound Email, and it opens the door to automating workflows whenever someone sends you an email.

📬 What is Inbound Email?

Inbound Email lets you “catch” messages sent to addresses like questions@yourdomain.com or replies to emails you’ve sent out.

Instead of delivering those emails to a regular inbox, Postmark processes them and sends the data directly to a webhook URL you provide.

What Postmark does

When an inbound message arrives, Postmark:

Accepts the incoming email
Extracts useful details, including:
- Sender address
- Subject line
- Message content (plain text and HTML)
- Attachments
Sends all of that data as a JSON payload to your webhook endpoint

💡 Note: Postmark does not store or display inbound emails in the UI. You control what happens to the data once it reaches your system.

🔧 What can you do with it?

That’s entirely up to you! Inbound Email is flexible and can power many use cases. Here are a few examples:

Use case	Example
Support teams	Automatically create tickets in a help desk (like Zendesk)
Education teams	Log attendee questions into a spreadsheet or internal dashboard
Internal tools	Save email records to a database for tracking or audits
Automation	Trigger Slack notifications, autoresponders, or workflows

🧑💻 Do I need a developer?

Usually, yes.

To use Inbound Email, you’ll need:

A publicly accessible webhook URL where Postmark can send the email data
Some code or tooling to decide what to do with it (e.g., save to a database, post to Slack, trigger an automation)

That said, you don’t always need to write code. Tools like Zapier or Make.com can connect Postmark to spreadsheets, CRMs, or notifications without custom development.

If you’re not sure what’s available to your team, check with your dev or ops folks.

📌 Real-life example

Let’s say your team runs a virtual workshop and asks participants to email questions to questions@yourdomain.com.

Using Inbound Email, Postmark can:

Receive those emails
Extract who it’s from, the message content, and any attachments
Instantly send that data to your webhook (for example, a Google Sheet or internal dashboard)
Log it for follow-up or notify your team in real time

💡 Think of it as an automated mailbox that feeds your workflow directly.

🤔 Common questions

Q: Why not just use a shared inbox like Gmail or Outlook?
A: You can—but those inboxes are designed for humans to read and reply manually. Inbound Email is better when you want to automate how messages are handled, routed, or stored without someone checking an inbox.

Q: Can I reply to emails from Postmark?
A: Nope. Inbound Email is a pass-through system. It receives messages and sends them to your backend—you control any replies or follow-ups outside of Postmark.

✅ TL;DR

Inbound Email lets you receive messages into your system, not just send them.
Postmark parses the message and sends the data to your webhook.
What happens next is up to you—Postmark doesn’t store the message.
Great for automation, structured intake, and internal tools.
Usually needs a developer or integration platform to set up.