Idea: Mailgun-like IMAP Service

Idea Pitches
#1

I am really hoping this exists but I spent some time this afternoon trying to find it and couldn’t.

I was thinking mailgun works great when you want to send/receive email from your specific domain and can turn email control for that domain over to them completely. However, I was thinking it would be cool to have a service that will periodically check an IMAP box and then if a message is received, parse it into all of its parts and then send to a URL via JSON or even have a REST interface to retrieve them. I found context.io which is a free service doing this with data-mining by their company for their needs but was thinking something paid that would keep data private might be useful for any company dealing with inbound email in some form.

#2

Mandrill might do this. They definitely support inbound email. Not sure about imap specifically.

#3

I’m sure there are lots of services that offer this. One is https://zapier.com/zapbook/imap/

#4

I’m thinking more along the line of a service that a SAAS would use. Let’s say it is for a hypothetical helpdesk where the helpdesk would be constantly checking mailboxes to see if any new messages are present. Instead of maintaining that code, the service would do the work and ping a URL when a new message comes in.

#5

I think Amazon SES does inbound email if that helps.

#6

Also have a look at nylas.com. It’s like a paid version of context.io with the advantage that they don’t data-mine your data.

I think context.io and nylas.com are both great if your app needs to access the inboxes of your users. You can delegate the user authentication to them and don’t need to handle polling over POP or IMAP.

If it’s however for accessing your own e-mail account through your app, have a look at my Quora answer here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-alternatives-to-Sendgrids-Parse-API/answer/Moritz-Dausinger

#7

Could you not just use their MX records on a subdomain, then set up a forwarding rule to deliver inbound mail to your imap box and send a copy to the mailgun subdomain? Ie support@example.com is delivered to the support imap mailbox, and also forwarded to support@mailgun.example.com?

#8

I think https://postmarkapp.com/ does this? Not sure, it’s been a while since I researched it.
Edit: Look’s like the quora link from earlier answers this well, and postmarkapp is included.

#9

Email2db is doing something similar. This is not a SAAS though but a desktop software.

#10

There are SaaS alternatives to Email2DB, for example my product mailparser.io :slight_smile: