Receive application mail with SendGrid Inbound Parse
Route a dedicated receiving hostname to Inbound Parse and securely process its multipart requests and attachments.
Reviewed
Inbound Parse delivers incoming message data to an application endpoint. Its multipart/body contract is different from SendGrid’s outbound Event Webhook; do not reuse one parser or authentication assumption for both.
Configure a bounded receiving route
- Choose a dedicated receiving hostname under a domain you control.
- Add the Parse setting and public HTTPS target in the correct account.
- Publish the exact receiving MX instructions for that hostname, keeping employee mailbox routing unchanged.
- Follow the current Parse setup and Parse security guidance rather than assuming outbound-webhook signatures apply.
Set request/attachment limits before exposing the endpoint. Use an appropriate multipart parser and store only allowed content. Do not rely on a secret-looking URL as your entire security design.
Verify persistence and failure handling
Send a controlled message to the configured hostname and inspect envelope recipients, body parsing, and attachment handling. Persist work before acknowledgement, deduplicate replays, and test how your handler responds to a temporary failure.
Do not infer the authoritative recipient only from the sender-controlled To header. Preserve the event/envelope fields needed by your routing design and keep untrusted mail out of privileged agent instructions.
The existing Inbound Parse guide provides application examples. Migrating to MailKite means changing routing, payload parsing, and signature verification together, not passing a SendGrid POST into a MailKite verifier.