Email Inbox (receiving emails as notifications)

Email Inbox — это «почтовый ящик», у которого вместо вашего IMAP — канал Notifly. Создав ящик, вы получаете уникальный email-адрес: всё, что на него приходит, превращается в обычное уведомление с заголовком письма и его телом и доставляется во все ваши клиенты (web, Android, desktop) как любое другое push-сообщение.

Это удобно, когда внешняя система умеет только email и научить её ходить в HTTP — слишком дорого:

• алёрты от хостингов, биллингов, RBL и регистраторов;
• уведомления от CI/CD, системы бэкапов, сторонних SaaS;
• transactional email от вашего же бекенда (заказы, регистрации) без отдельного канала push;
• алёрты от старых железных мониторингов, которые умеют только SMTP.

How it works

SMTP sender ──► <local>+<alias>@<domain>
                     │
                     ▼
              Yandex Cloud Mail Trigger
                     │
                     ▼
        Cloud Function notifly-email
                     │  1. extract alias from address (To / X-Original-To / Delivered-To)
                     │  2. find EmailInbox in YDB by alias
                     │  3. Subject → title, plain-body → message
                     ▼
       INSERT messages + push via WebSocket
                     │
                     ▼
        All your clients receive the notification

• Маршрутизация — по subaddress-части +alias в локальной части адреса (postmaster+abc123@your-mail.yandexcloud.net) или по выделенному домену.
• Хранение — таблица email_inboxes в YDB с уникальным индексом по alias.
• Push — то же самое, что у обычного POST /message: моментальный фрейм по WebSocket плюс запись в БД для последующих GET /message.

Creating an inbox

Via the admin UI

1. Open app.notifly.ru → Email Inbox.
2. Click “Create inbox”, and fill in:
   • Name — for display, e.g. “Alerts Reg.ru”.
   • Channel — where to store incoming emails as notifications.
3. A generated email address will appear in the table — this is the authentication. Copy it into the external service’s settings.

Via REST API

curl -X POST "$NOTIFLY_URL/email-inbox" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -H "X-Gotify-Key: <client-token>" \
     -d '{
       "name": "Alerts Reg.ru",
       "appId": 12345
     }'

The response will include the inbox object with the emailAddress field filled:

{
  "id": 17,
  "appId": 12345,
  "appName": "Operations",
  "name": "Alerts Reg.ru",
  "alias": "a3f9c2",
  "emailAddress": "postmaster+a3f9c2@your-mail.yandexcloud.net",
  "created": "2026-04-30T10:11:12Z",
  "lastUsed": null
}

Via MCP (for an AI assistant)

If you have configured the Notifly MCP server, simply ask:

Create an Email Inbox for the “Operations” channel named “Alerts Reg.ru” and send me the resulting address.

Usage

Any SMTP client sends an email to the obtained address — no authorization headers are required (alias itself is the secret). The minimal example:

# msmtp / mailx
echo "Database hasn't been updated overnight — check replication." \
  | mail -s "[ALERT] backups: lag > 24h" \
         "postmaster+a3f9c2@your-mail.yandexcloud.net"

From Python:

import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage

msg = EmailMessage()
msg["To"]      = "postmaster+a3f9c2@your-mail.yandexcloud.net"
msg["From"]    = "alerts@example.com"
msg["Subject"] = "[ALERT] backups: lag > 24h"
msg.set_content("Database hasn't been updated overnight — check replication.")

with smtplib.SMTP("smtp.example.com", 587) as s:
    s.starttls()
    s.login("user", "pass")
    s.send_message(msg)

What will appear in the notification

Notification field	Source
title	Email subject (Subject:)
message	The text body of the email (text/plain part)
priority	The channel’s default priority
date	The time the email arrived in the Cloud Function

The HTML part, if present, is discarded: the notification is a short plain-text. If the email is pure HTML, the textual branch of multipart/alternative will be used if present; otherwise — an empty string.

REST API

Method and path	Authorization	Purpose
GET /email-inbox	client-token	list of inboxes
POST /email-inbox	client-token (write)	create
PUT /email-inbox/:id	client-token (write)	rename / change channel
DELETE /email-inbox/:id	client-token (write)	delete

POST accepts EmailInboxParams — {name, appId}. The response always returns the full EmailInbox object, including the public emailAddress (it’s convenient to copy it straight into the external system’s settings).

How to change the address?

The address is generated automatically and is immutable. If the address has “leaked” — delete the inbox and create a new one: the alias parameter will be different, and old emails sent to the old address will be discarded by the Mail Trigger after deletion.

Limitations

• Plain-text only — HTML markup is ignored, attachments are not saved.
• Email size — within the limits of Yandex Cloud Mail Trigger.
• The address is case-sensitive with respect to the alias (stored lower-case).
• Under high load (>1 email/sec per inbox) notifications will arrive in batches — the Cloud Function scales, but Notifly does not deduplicate notifications automatically.