Accepting Files Via Email

Inboxes can be used to receive files from email attachments. Your site provides settings that affect whether and how an Inbox handles incoming emails.

When your Inbox allows uploads via email, any application, system, or person can send files directly to your inbox. When the behavior is enabled, a unique email address is generated for this inbox. Anyone with the address can then upload by sending an email attachment, unless you restrict the allowed senders to specific addresses or domains.

CRM, ERP, or HRMS applications, such as Salesforce, Workday, Marketo, ServiceNow, can upload files directly to the inboxes using the email address. Users can forward the emails with attachments to this email address in To, Cc, or Bcc fields.

The body and the subject of the email will not be uploaded to your inbox or associated folder; only attached files will be uploaded, and files with the same name will be overwritten. However, if your email body contains embedded images or images in the email signatures, those images will be uploaded to the inbox along with the any other email attachments.

Your inbox cannot require a password and allow email uploads, because your recipient could not provide a password via email. To ensure that only the appropriate people are uploading to your Inbox, enable inbound email authentication for your site, then whitelist the addresses or domains you wish to allow.

Inboxes cannot collect registration information through email, so you cannot require registration on an Inbox that allows email uploads. Similarly, if your Inbox requires registration, you cannot enable email uploads.

If your inbox is integrated into an automated workflow where a third-party application or system automatically uploads files via email, you may want to ensure that your inbox is exclusively used for receiving files via email and prevent any web access.

To receive files only through email and prevent web uploads, you can enable the Disallow web browser uploads to this inbox setting. This disables all web access to the inbox.

The Allow only these senders to upload via email setting limits which email addresses can upload files into the Inbox. With this setting enabled, the uploads to the inbox can be restricted to certain sender email addresses or email domains (example: *@example.com or @example.com). Only the specified senders can upload files to the inbox and all other senders will be discarded by the system. Your list can include up to 10 email addresses or email domains. A site administrator must enable Inbound email authentication for your site to enforce email restrictions. The allowed email addresses or domains will be verified via SPF, DKIM and DMARC to prevent spoofing or other misuse. Emails that do not pass these checks will be discarded by the system.

You can enable the Notify senders on successful upload via Email setting to send an acknowledgment receipt email to the sender whenever a file is successfully stored from an inbound email to the Inbox.

Even if you have enabled email receipts for uploaders, they will not receive an email acknowledgement about any files that failed to upload. For example, files might fail to upload due to recipient restrictions, because of folder settings that restrict upload types, or because your Inbox folder is on a Remote Server Mount that was offline when the email was received.