SendGrid is offering a robust event webhook in the form of Inbound Email Parse, an API feature that allows you to receive emails for a specified domain, before automatically posting the email content and its metadata to a web endpoint of your choice.
This is a cool way to implement an automated email handling service in .NET. Here’s how you can easily receive emails direct to your REST project.
(This post assumes you have a SendGrid account and a .NET project that can receive HTTP POST requests.
Configure Inbound Parse in SendGrid
First, log into your SendGrid account and open the ‘Inbound Parse’ page via ‘Settings’
Then, after clicking ‘Add Host & URL’ you should see a configuration screen on which you can specify the domain you are receiving mail for, the URL for the web service you will be posting events to, whether you wish to have SendGrid check for spam on receive (this is optional) and whether you wish to have SendGrid send the raw MIME in the events that are posted.
Make sure you tick the box to send raw MIME, as we will want to parse this within our .NET project.
In terms of adding the domain on which you are receiving mail, you will need to ensure you have the ability to add an MX record via your domain provider. SendGrid has documented this process here, so please make sure this is complete before starting.
Parsing Email contents from the Incoming SendGrid Event
Now that you have configured your Inbound Parse endpoint and added your email domain, any mail for that domain will be routed to SendGrid, who will post an event containing form-encoded data to the url you specified. All that remains is for you to parse the data you receive.
Here is an example of a message sent from SendGrid:
array(11) {
["dkim"]=>
string(22) "{@sendgrid.com : pass}"
["email"]=>
string(8879) "Received: by mx0032p1mdw1.sendgrid.net with SMTP id rOkt2xLLKV Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:06:29 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from mail-it0-f45.google.com (mail-it0-f45.google.com [209.85.214.45]) by mx0032p1mdw1.sendgrid.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 26D6080397 for <parse@parse.yourdomain>; Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:06:22 +0000 (UTC)
Received: by mail-it0-f45.google.com with SMTP id f6so93587860ith.1 for <example@example.comom>; Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:06:22 -0700 (PDT)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=sendgrid.com; s=ga1; h=mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=UYWCIUKTVXyV9U41l+c9+qOlpoeQGcJkKpyOAatNr3Y=; b=c1I/LcqHEJklmAThWr9Z8NKlTPHUlE/8sDSpK382fJtIQcGdUtczG0pijnUHegrFVt FDr4NehtJDD9KFvXLXboLCtObsu5HTN99ckUCCZTibZseA+J8U3jjCqTdj1fmUage5C7 //Iwi0Ndioonzhm18J7KStap66yZ69ED7UxPk=
X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20130820; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=UYWCIUKTVXyV9U41l+c9+qOlpoeQGcJkKpyOAatNr3Y=; b=lgmLXnmmpNcQMckjshsZsa2/8OjFZzntWYSG5XZo0fi32KHLuBLSHuNDFXn0V4ICp1 1xuT2fZCyhBSgNBiWNbjqFspdemzrBjaI1Tgm/Zz8Fv6wW2XdjpoANNQzJxfdhnecPd5 HvZ5P8+KTqjr4tAa9RmLthDc3UqhV9NRnCnhbW/AZaVQLB8eoJus92tD1GeXpBQml5XF m6vPUGrWGZWNugINkRKxIpk+2uECglAjNm4NpZIi9j7N94CxA18RC4NJ59WIsSybtIer hbCgT1Q13rvGEzvnp6FfFQVbE3DOibNqd0bh/EvZCagFVbnenNc/Q+qHtU9KqFlisSOp xh0w==
X-Gm-Message-State: ALyK8tINVaZIP8YCgQbpg5ya8EnqQo76uxkXUPpDnM+kAyAQQzehFU10EgyuAe2fAmWf/muBiFDy0JDU74Eclp1/
X-Received: by 10.36.76.16 with SMTP id a16mr4479786itb.77.1468940781988; Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:06:21 -0700 (PDT)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Received: by 10.107.48.17 with HTTP; Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:06:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sender Name <example@example.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:06:21 -0600
Message-ID: <CAN_P_JNa25--hzm5=-ES9cnxgWa+h+E49OOAS7sPpV0gsoXCOw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Hello
To: example@example.comom
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=001a11447dc881e40f0537fe6d5a
--001a11447dc881e40f0537fe6d5a
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11447dc881e40b0537fe6d58
--001a11447dc881e40b0537fe6d58
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
This is a test email with 1 attachment.
--001a11447dc881e40b0537fe6d58
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<div dir=3D"ltr">This is a test email with 1 attachment.<br clear=3D"all"><=
div><br></div>-- <br><div class=3D"gmail_signature" data-smartmail=3D"gmail=
_signature"><div dir=3D"ltr"><img src=3D"https://sendgrid.com/brand/sg-logo=
-email.png" width=3D"96" height=3D"17"><br><div><br></div></div></div>
</div>
--001a11447dc881e40b0537fe6d58--
--001a11447dc881e40f0537fe6d5a
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Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="DockMcWordface.docx"
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"
["to"]=>
string(22) "example@example.comom"
["from"]=>
string(33) "Sender Name <example@example.com>"
["sender_ip"]=>
string(13) "209.85.214.45"
["spam_report"]=>
string(798) "Spam detection software, running on the system "mx0032p1mdw1.sendgrid.net", has
identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message
has been attached to this so you can view it (if it isn't spam) or label
similar future email. If you have any questions, see
@@CONTACT_ADDRESS@@ for details.
Content preview: This is a test email with 1 attachment.
Content analysis details: (0.4 points, 5.0 required)
pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
0.3 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04 BODY: HTML: images with 0-400 bytes of words
0.0 T_MIME_NO_TEXT No text body parts
"
["envelope"]=>
string(73) "{"to":["example@example.comom"],"from":"example@example.com"}"
["subject"]=>
string(5) "Hello"
["spam_score"]=>
string(5) "0.353"
["charsets"]=>
string(47) "{"to":"UTF-8","subject":"UTF-8","from":"UTF-8"}"
["SPF"]=>
string(4) "pass"
}
If we wanted to access the email content, for maybe reconstructing attachment data or getting the message body, we need the “email” property of the data received. There’s a really good library available for parsing multipart form content which you can find on Github or add to your project via NuGet called HttpMultiPartParser. Add this library to your project and then lets parse the email content.
The library allows you to write the data to a stream, from which you can then read individual sections of the multipart content into a string.
If I wanted to get the MIME content from the example above, I could use the HttpMultiPartParser library like so:
Using (var emailStream = New MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Payload)))
{
var parser = MultipartFormDataParser.Parse(EmailStream);
var sendGridEmail = Parser.GetParameterValue("email");
}
From this point, you have the email MIME, which means you can do pretty much whatever you need to do with it. You could use a library like MimeKit to load the MIME text into a new MimeMessage object. Then you could get the attachments, read the from address and pretty much anything else to do with managing email messages.
SendGrid Inbound Parse offers a pretty robust entry point into the automation of incoming emails that easy to configure. I’ve been really happy with this solution as a means of creating an entry point for emails into my automation projects.
For those of you looking for a no-code alternative to this setup, Parker Software is about to release a major new version of ThinkAutomation, an Robotic Process Automation solution for which I am proud to be a developer.
The application provides unique URL endpoints for you to send SendGrid events to, which are automatically parsed for further automation. Well worth considering if you’re looking to quickly automate inbound email handling. What’s more, there’ll be a free developer version, so a proof of concept will cost nothing. I hope to see you there 🙂
