Polling IMAP accounts and forwarding to your Website via HTTP

We've deprecated our IMAP polling system.

CloudMailin strives to delivery your messages instantly and polling an IMAP server to receive email always worked against that strategy. We recommend that you look at CloudMailin's standard approach to collecting email and delivering it via HTTP POST here.

IMAP polling allows you to collect email from existing email accounts and deliver the email to your web app via HTTP POST. Although there are a number of drawbacks to using this approach, using IMAP polling can provide an alternative solution for message retrieval and in some cases it's the best option. It can also be used to transition from legacy setups to the CloudMailin architecture.

IMAP polling allows you to enter the IMAP details of an existing email account and will periodically poll that account and collect the email from the account. Messages that are received will be marked as read and any that fail will remain unread and tried next time.

Disadvantages to Polling

There are several disadvantages to using this method:

  • Messages are only collected periodically, with the normal setup messages will arrive in real time.
  • Communication with the sending server has already occurred so features such as Auth Callbacks, Auth Regexp and SPF will not work for IMAP messages.
  • The HTTP Status codes that you return will never result in a hard bounce, just a message being marked as read or unread on the server.

We recommend contacting us before you setup an IMAP poller to be sure you're getting the best from our system. In many cases there's an alternative option allowing you to use the standard, more effective, setup.