Email routing made easy: Parse and simplify every inbound message

Cut through the noise and clutter of inbound email with a solution that fits your use case with Mailgun’s Inbound Routes – our proprietary email parsing software.
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Optimize inbound email

Two-way communication is essential to the success of any modern business. While sending email is complex enough, handling incoming messages presents an entirely different set of challenges. Email threads, multipart MIME messages, and irrelevant data can make it hard to extract the information that matters most. That’s where inbound email routing comes in – it helps you automatically parse, organize, and prioritize incoming emails, reducing the risk of missed messages, customer frustration, and wasted time.

For the communication-conscious business, these complex incoming messages are simplified and parsed into all of the data you need with Inbound Routes.

Email Routes turning into simple data

Eliminate Inbox Clutter with Inbound Email Routing

Getting rid of all of the clutter is the first step towards a streamlined incoming email solution. Inbound Routes allow senders to clean up complicated email threads by fully parsing your inbound messages and converting them to UTF-8 JSON for easy reading. Through parsing, you’re able to extract data that is important to your business, rather than collecting email signatures and repeated content in an email thread.

Illustration of inbound routing.

Automated inbound email routing

Meaningful communication can get lost in the noise of spam messages and auto-replies. Controlling your incoming emails goes beyond making them easy to read. Inbound Routes uses automation to simplify cutting through the static and allows you to funnel messages in a way that best suits your business use case.

Whether it's grouping all auto-replies to the same URL endpoint to be measured in your CRM or forwarding messages that match a specific rule to another email address, Inbound Routes will get your messages to their next destination with ease.

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How an email parser software works

Rule-based email parsers use regular expressions to understand the contents of email data. By scanning the email headers, email body, and email attachments, an email parser can use parsing rules to identify key parts of the message and extract data. Email parsers ignore quoted messages and other irrelevant message content and select only the important data.

From there, what happens to that extracted data largely depends on the Route endpoint you have specified for those messages.

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Email API integration made easy

Mailgun Email API makes integrating email into your existing applications incredibly easy with our RESTFUL API, SMTP relays, and comprehensive documentation. Whether you need to send one thousand or 10 million emails in minutes, Mailgun Email API’s infrastructure scales with you and boasts 99.99% server uptime – so you’re never caught in a bind when you need it most.

Looking for a place to get started? Mailgun Email API’s Documentation covers popular programming languages like Python, Ruby, Java, C# to make implementation as painless as possible.

Inbound email routing use cases

In-app comment & message posting: Let users reply directly to notification emails to post comments or messages. Inbound email routing parses their responses and delivers them straight into your app’s interface.

Email-driven support ticketing: Enable seamless email replies to customer support tickets. Incoming messages are parsed and appended to the correct ticket thread in your helpdesk system.

Anonymous in-app chat: Power private, anonymous conversations by routing messages between users while masking personal email addresses.

Email-to-app/website workflows: Convert emails into structured content—like itinerary updates, to‑do items, or draft blog posts – by parsing inbound messages and routing them into your application or CMS. 

We’re able to ensure a better service for our marketers by using Mailgun. They count on us, and we count on Mailgun: and this relationship helps us maintain credibility with our customers.
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Paulius Milisauskas VP of Customer Operations

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Inbound email routing empowers true two‑way dialogue with your customers. By automatically directing replies into your workflows or applications, it simplifies communication, keeps conversations organized, and ensures every message lands in the right place.

Mailbox routing: Targets a single email address (e.g., support@yourcompany.com), so only messages sent to that inbox are processed by your routing rules.

Domain routing: Captures every email sent to your entire domain (e.g., anything@yourcompany.com) and applies your routing rules across all addresses at once.

Forwarding: Simply passes an incoming message on to another inbox or device, keeping it in its original format.

Routing: Goes further—parsing and transforming messages as they arrive, then delivering the data into your apps, ticketing systems, or custom endpoints for seamless integration. 

With inbound email routing, you can define custom parsing rules using regular expressions or JSONPath. Mailgun applies these rules to your incoming messages—automatically pulling out fields such as order numbers, customer IDs, or any other pattern you specify—and returns them in your webhook payload as structured JSON.

Yes. Inbound Routes can be configured to capture attachments alongside message content. When an email arrives, Mailgun will base64‑encode attachments and include them in the webhook payload, allowing you to store, process, or forward them wherever your application requires.

Parsed emails are delivered in UTF‑8 encoded JSON by default, with separate fields for headers, body content (plain text and HTML), and attachments. You can also request multipart form‑data if your endpoint prefers that format, ensuring maximum compatibility with your stack.

Mailgun’s Control Panel provides a live log of every incoming message processed by your routes. You can inspect the raw email, parsed JSON payload, and routing decisions. Additionally, webhooks include detailed HTTP response codes and error messages to help you troubleshoot any delivery or parsing issues in real time.

Explore beyond email parsing

Mailgun has a variety of features for companies in need of email parsing software.

Use Cases

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