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Email forwarding webhook

Turn emails from apps that can only send email into alerts, by forwarding them to a private PingLoom address.

Setup

  1. In PingLoom open Webhooks, choose New webhook source, pick Email forwarding and create it. Copy the address (it looks like [email protected]). It stays on the source page.
  2. Gmail: open Settings, See all settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, Add a forwarding address, and paste the address. Gmail sends a confirmation email to it. PingLoom shows the confirmation code and link on the source page, so enter the code in Gmail to finish.
  3. Gmail: open Settings, Filters and Blocked Addresses, Create a new filter, describe the mails you want (for example from your bank), choose Forward it to and pick the address.
  4. Outlook: open Settings, Mail, Rules, Add new rule, choose the conditions, set the action to Forward to and paste the address. Microsoft's documentation describes no confirmation mail for this, so PingLoom does not look for one. Send a test mail to check.
  5. Optional: add allowed senders (addresses such as [email protected], or whole domains such as bank.com) on the source page. Mail from anyone else is ignored.

Verification

There is no signature: the address itself is the secret. It is random and unguessable, and you can replace it at any time from the source page. The sender allowlist is a filter for your convenience, not authentication, because the From line of an email can be forged.

Events

You choose which events become alerts when you create the source, and you can change it later on the source page.

EventPriorityOn by default

Each alert has the email subject as its title and the first 300 characters of the plain-text part as its body (HTML is turned into plain text and never displayed). Its data holds the masked sender (r***@bank.com), the sender domain, the time PingLoom received it and the message ID. The full message and attachments are never stored.

Messages over 1 MB are refused. A repeated Message-ID counts once. Each email counts as one event against your plan and follows the source's rate limit.

Email forwarding only appears once the server has an inbound email domain configured. Until then the option is hidden.