Mailboxes: send documents by email

A mailbox is an email address your workspace owns. Forward a receipt, an invoice or a statement to it — or have a supplier send there directly — and every Document Extractor feed attached to the mailbox extracts the document and writes the rows to its destination. One mailbox can feed several extractors, and one extractor can listen to several mailboxes. (Mailboxes used to be called inboxes; every inbox is now a mailbox with the same address, feeds and history.)

Each mailbox has its own log: every email the address received and what happened to it. If an email did not turn into rows, the log says why, in one line.

Creating a mailbox#

Open Mailboxes from More in the workspace header, or open a Document Extractor feed's Sources tab and choose New mailbox for this feed. The address is generated for you, looks like quiet-otter-7f3k@inbox.banksync.io, and never changes. You can rename the mailbox (the name is only for you) but not that address.

The address is all lowercase, and mail addressed to it in any capitalisation arrives. Copy it from the mailbox page and paste it into a forwarding rule in Gmail, Outlook or your accounting software.

Attaching feeds#

A mailbox delivers to every feed attached to it. Attach and detach feeds from the mailbox's page or from a feed's Sources tab (Attach an existing mailbox). Each attached feed runs its own extraction on every email, with its own job in that feed's history.

A mailbox with no feeds attached still receives: the email is logged and nothing runs. Attach a feed and forward the email again.

Who may send: allowed senders#

By default a mailbox accepts mail from anyone. Turn on Allowed senders to accept only senders you name:

• an exact address — ap@supplier.com
• a whole domain — @supplier.com (or supplier.com). A domain entry admits every address on that domain and no subdomain of it.

An allowed sender only counts when the receiving mail server could confirm the email really came from that address. Anyone can type someone else's address into the From line, so an email that claims to be from an allowed sender but cannot be confirmed is Held with "We couldn't confirm this really came from …". Choose Release if you know it is genuine. An admin can choose Allow unverified from this sender for a supplier whose mail never confirms — with the warning that anyone could then pretend to be them.

An email from a sender not on the list is Held too, and the log offers Allow sender to add it in one click. Nothing extracts a held email until someone releases it.

Why an email may not show up#

Open the mailbox and read its log. Each email is one row:

If there is no row at all, the email never reached the mailbox: check the address in your forwarding rule character by character, and your mail provider's sent folder. BankSync never bounces mail to an unknown address, so a typo is silent on the sending side too.

Pausing, trash and deleting#

Pause a mailbox to stop delivering to feeds: mail still arrives and is held, and when you resume you can process what arrived meanwhile. Move to trash works the same way — the address keeps receiving and holds mail, and Restore offers to process it. Delete forever removes the mailbox and everything it received; its addresses are not given to anyone else for 90 days. Deleting a mailbox never deletes the feeds attached to it or anything they extracted.

Replying from a mailbox#

A mailbox can reply to or forward an email it received, and write to members of your workspace or to addresses that confirmed by link that you may write to them. It cannot write to strangers. Your workspace can send up to 30 emails an hour and 200 a day; the mailbox page shows today's count. Your email shows as "Mailbox name via BankSync". If too many emails bounce or are marked as spam, sending pauses and a workspace owner can resume it.

Your old extract+ addresses#

Before mailboxes, each Document Extractor feed had an address like extract+FEEDID@receipts.banksync.io. Those addresses keep working indefinitely: mail sent to one arrives in the feed's mailbox and its log like any other email. You do not need to change any forwarding rule. The mailbox page shows both addresses.

What BankSync keeps#

For each email a mailbox receives, BankSync keeps the sender's address, the recipients and the subject as they appeared in the message, what happened to it, and the raw email, for as long as the mailbox exists. Deleting the mailbox forever deletes them. The documents themselves live on as the rows your feeds extracted, in your destination.