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Triggering a Flow When a New Email is Received

The Email connector provides a listener (called On New Email in the Studio UIs) that polls an email folder from a mailbox for all the unread emails in it, generating a new message for each email that is found.

The key part of this functionality is how to determine that an email is new. There are three strategies for making this determination:

  • Setting the deleteAfterRetrieve parameter to true. This setting deletes each email from the mailbox folder after it has been processed so that all emails found in the next poll will be new.

  • Using a matcher to filter the polled emails.

  • The IMAP protocol also can take advantage of the watermark parameter to only pick emails that have been received after the last poll was executed.

Listener

The Email Connector provides two listeners that function similarly for the IMAP and POP3 protocols. However, the name of the XML element used depends on the email protocol:

  • listener-imap

  • listener-pop3

You can configure a scheduling-strategy on the listener to change the polling frequency of the components.

Example: IMAP Email Listener (On New Email Trigger)
<flow name="OnNewEmail">
    <email:listener-imap config-ref="imap-config">
        <scheduling-strategy>
            <fixed-frequency frequency="2000"/>
        </scheduling-strategy>
    </email:listener-imap>
    <flow-ref name="processEmail"/>
</flow>
Example: POP3 Email Listener (On New Email Trigger)
<flow name="OnNewEmail">
    <email:listener-pop3 config-ref="pop3-config">
        <scheduling-strategy>
            <fixed-frequency frequency="2000"/>
        </scheduling-strategy>
    </email:listener-pop3>
    <flow-ref name="processEmail"/>
</flow>

Delete After Retrieve

Both the POP3 and IMAP listeners can set the deleteAfterRetrieve parameter to true, enabling the deletion of the polled emails after processing is complete. This feature is disabled by default to avoid deleting emails by mistake.

Example: Delete After Retrieve
<flow name="OnNewEmailDeleteAfterProcessed">
    <email:listener-pop3 config-ref="pop3-config" deleteAfterRetrieve="true">
        <scheduling-strategy>
            <fixed-frequency/>
        </scheduling-strategy>
    </email:listener-pop3>
    <flow-ref name="processEmail"/>
</flow>

This parameter is commonly used with the POP3 protocol because there is no watermark support for it. By deleting processed emails, you can ensure that the next processed emails are new ones.

Is is important to understand that this feature DELETE the emails from the configured Mailbox Folder.

Watermarking

The Email connector can watermark emails when over the IMAP protocol, filtering emails based on their received date.

To enable watermark using the listener-imap trigger, just set the watermark parameter to true so that dispatched messages only contain emails received after the last poll executed.

Example: IMAP Watermark Email Listener
<flow name="OnNewEmailWatermark">
    <email:listener-imap config-ref="imap-config" watermark="true">
        <scheduling-strategy>
            <fixed-frequency/>
        </scheduling-strategy>
    </email:listener-imap>
    <flow-ref name="processEmail"/>
</flow>

Matchers

Custom matcher configurations provide another way of filtering the dispatched messages.

Both the POP3 and IMAP listeners have their own matchers that can filter emails by dates, addresses, subject, and flags (SEEN, ANSWERED, and so on).

Example: Email Listener with Matcher
<flow name="OnNewEmailWatermark">
    <email:listener-imap config-ref="imap-config">
        <scheduling-strategy>
            <fixed-frequency/>
        </scheduling-strategy>
        <email:imap-matcher subjectRegex="IMPORTANT"/>
    </email:listener-imap>
    <flow-ref name="processEmail"/>
</flow>

The example above only dispatches email messages that contain the word "IMPORTANT" in their subject.

Naming Strategy for Attachments

Email Connector provides a parameter for the List and On New Email operations that enables you to specify a strategy for naming attachments. This parameter is set at the configuration level, but can be overridden at the operation level.

You can specify one of the following values for the parameter:

  • NAME (default)
    When the value is set to NAME, the connector names the attachment after the value of the filename field in the Content-Disposition line of the attachment (this is the standard and recommended way of setting the name for an attachment). If the filename field is not present or is empty, then the attachment is named "Unnamed". If multiple attachments have no name then they are called "Unnamed", "Unnamed_1", "Unnamed_2", and so on so that they can be addressed individually.

  • NAME_HEADERS
    When the value is set to NAME_HEADERS, the connector first tries to obtain the name from the filename field in the Content-Disposition line (the same as when using NAME). If that fails, the connector looks for the name header in the Content-Type line of the attachment. If the name header is not present or is empty, then the attachment is named "Unnamed".

  • NAME_HEADERS_SUBJECT
    When the value is set to NAME_HEADERS_SUBJECT, the connector tries the two previously described strategies. If both fail, then the connector checks if the attachment itself is an email (a nested message) and looks for the subject of the email. If the subject is not empty, then the attachment is named after the subject. Otherwise, the attachment is named "Unnamed".

Examples

Email Configuration with Naming Strategy
<email:imap-config name="gmail" attachmentNamingStrategy="NAME_HEADERS">
  <email:imap-connection host="imap.gmail.com" port="993" user="user@gmail.com" password="mypassword">
  </email:imap-connection>
</email:imap-config>
Email Listener (On New Email) overriding the Naming Strategy
<email:listener-imap config-ref="gmail" attachmentNamingStrategy="NAME_HEADERS_SUBJECT">
    <scheduling-strategy>
        <fixed-frequency/>
    </scheduling-strategy>
</email:listener-imap>
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