Receive email into a flow

A lot of work arrives by email — invoices to file, enquiries to answer, requests to act on. Routario can take that email off your plate: every message sent to your workspace’s intake address is filed into Memory, and any flow you’ve set to listen starts automatically, with the email’s details ready to act on.

Your intake address

How mail reaches Routario depends on how you run it:

• Routario Cloud (SaaS): your workspace has a ready-made intake address — <your-workspace>@mail.routario.com (your workspace slug, then @mail.routario.com). Anything sent there arrives in your workspace.
• Self-hosted: there’s no shared address — your administrator points a receiving domain of your own at Routario. Ask them which address to use.

You can hand this address out, forward mail to it, or set up a rule in your normal inbox that auto-forwards certain messages (say, everything from a supplier) straight into Routario.

What happens when an email arrives

The moment a message lands, Routario files it into Memory:

• the body becomes a document you can search and reference, and
• each attachment becomes its own linked document, tied back to the email it came on — so a forwarded invoice PDF is stored and ready to read.

It’s idempotent: if the same message somehow arrives twice, it’s filed once, and your flows fire once. Then Routario starts every active flow whose trigger is Incoming email and whose recipient filter matches the address it was sent to.

Filing happens whether or not a flow runs

Even with no flow listening, the email and its attachments are still saved into Memory. A flow is how you act on what arrived — it isn’t what captures it.

The Incoming email trigger

To make a flow start on inbound mail, give it an Incoming email trigger.

It has one optional setting — Match recipient — a pattern that decides which addresses fire this flow:

Match recipient	Fires on
(empty)	every email that reaches your workspace
invoices@*	anything addressed to an invoices@… address
*@acme.cz	anything addressed to your acme.cz domain

The pattern is a simple wildcard match (case-insensitive). Use it to run different flows for different addresses — invoices down one flow, support down another.

One inbox, many flows

Several flows can listen at once. An email to invoices@… can fire your invoice-filing flow while a catch-all flow logs every message — Routario starts each one whose Match recipient matches.

What your flow can read

Once a flow starts, the email is available to every step as plain values — no trigger. prefix:

Value	What it is
{{ from }}	the sender’s address
{{ from_name }}	the sender’s display name
{{ subject }}	the subject line
{{ body }}	the plain-text body
{{ to }}	the recipient addresses (a list)
{{ attachments }}	the attachments (a list — see below)
{{ source_doc_id }}	the Memory document for the email body

Each item in {{ attachments }} carries four fields:

• filename — the original name, e.g. invoice.pdf
• mime — the file type, e.g. application/pdf
• size — the size in bytes
• ref — the Memory document id; hand this to an OCR or document step to read the file

So a step can branch on whether there are attachments, loop over them, or filter by name — for example, only act on PDFs.

Worked example: file incoming invoices

Forward supplier invoices to your intake address and have Routario read each PDF and log it.

1. Incoming email trigger. Set Match recipient to invoices@* so only invoice emails start this flow.

2. Loop the attachments. Add a For each over {{ attachments }}. Inside the loop, each file exposes {{ loop.item.filename }}, {{ loop.item.mime }}, and {{ loop.item.ref }}.

3. Read the document. Pass {{ loop.item.ref }} to an OCR step to pull the text (and fields) out of the PDF.

4. Store it. Add a Create record into your invoices table with the values you read.

The body and every attachment are already in Memory the instant the email arrives — the flow’s job is simply to act on them.

Test with a real email first

Send (or forward) one real message to your intake address and run the flow against it before you rely on it. Check that the Match recipient pattern fires, and that the attachments show up where you expect.

Where to go next

• Branch on an AI decision — classify each incoming email and route urgent / normal / spam differently.
• Send email from a flow — reply to the sender, or notify a colleague, once you’ve acted.
• Memory: what Routario remembers — where the email body and attachments are filed.