Concept
What is inbound email parsing?
Inbound email parsing is the process of turning a raw received email into structured fields a program can use — the sender, subject, clean message body, and attachments. It's the receiving-side counterpart to sending email: instead of composing a message, you're taking one that arrived and making sense of it in code.
Why raw email is messy
When a mail server delivers a message, it hands you an RFC 5322 / MIME document, not a tidy object. A single email can carry both an HTML and a plain-text version, several encodings, inline images, and base64-encoded attachments — all wrapped in nested multipart boundaries. On a reply, it's worse: the sender's mail client appends the entire quoted thread (“On Tuesday, X wrote:”) and a signature block, so the two sentences the person actually typed are buried in a wall of repeated text.
What parsing produces
Parsing extracts the useful parts into named fields. Good inbound parsing goes further than a raw MIME split — it also strips the quoted history and signature, so you keep only the new message, and identifies the sender and subject cleanly. The result is a small object like this:
{
"from": { "name": "Jane Doe", "email": "jane@example.com" },
"subject": "Re: your invoice",
"text": "Yes, that works for me.",
"attachments": [],
"received_at": "2026-07-01T09:51:18.945Z"
}Parse it yourself, or at the edge
You have two options. You can run your own SMTP server (or a provider's inbound MX), then parse the raw MIME with a library and write your own quote/signature stripping. Or you can point an address at an inbound email webhook service that parses at the edge and POSTs clean JSON to your app — no mail server to operate. That's what ReplyFlow does: every email to your address arrives parsed, cleaned, threaded, and intent-tagged.
Frequently asked
How do you parse inbound email to JSON?
Run an SMTP server plus a MIME parser yourself, or point an address at an inbound email service that parses at the edge and delivers a JSON object to your webhook — sender, subject, cleaned text, thread id, and intent, with quoted history and signatures removed.
Is inbound parsing the same as IMAP polling?
No. IMAP polling means repeatedly checking a mailbox and downloading raw messages to parse later — slow and fragile. Inbound parsing at the edge pushes each message to you, already structured, the moment it arrives.