Forwarding your existing mailbox
Your vendors already have an address for you. It is printed on their remittance templates, saved in their billing systems and typed from memory by the bookkeeper at the plumbing firm. You are not going to change all of that by sending one email, and you should not try.
This page is for whoever administers that mailbox. It explains why forwarding is the route into InletAP, what a forwarded message looks like when it arrives, and how to set one up at the three kinds of provider most property managers run.
Why InletAP cannot receive mail for your own domain
Mail for yourcompany.com goes wherever the MX records in your DNS say it goes, and those records are yours. Whoever holds them — Google, Microsoft, your IT provider — decides what happens to every message addressed to you.
InletAP receives mail on domains it controls. Your organization gets its own subdomain of inlet-ap.com, and every intake mailbox lives on it:
ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
No vendor can take delivery of mail addressed to a domain it does not run, and any that claims otherwise is describing a DNS change you would have to make anyway. Forwarding is the honest version of the same thing: your provider keeps control of your domain, and hands InletAP a copy of what arrives.
What arrives when you forward
A forwarded message reaches InletAP with your intake mailbox as the envelope recipient. That is what decides which workspace and which mailbox the message belongs to.
The From header is a different matter, and it is worth understanding because your rules read it.
| How the message was sent on | What Source email sees |
|---|---|
| Automatic forwarding at your provider | The original sender, in most cases — the vendor |
| A person pressing Forward by hand | That person, because their mail client wrote a new header |
InletAP reads the sender as a parsed address, so a rule matching contains "@bluepointhvac.com" works on the address itself rather than on the display name wrapped around it. If your team forwards invoices by hand, write your rules on something that survives the forward — the vendor, the amount, a property alias — rather than on the sender.
Attachments and body text are pulled out of the MIME structure server-side, so a forwarded chain with the invoice three replies down is still read.
The two-wave rollout
Nobody migrates an accounts payable inbox in one move. Most companies run two waves at once, which sounds like more work and is in fact less.
| Wave | What you do | Who it covers |
|---|---|---|
| New | Put the InletAP address on purchase orders, vendor onboarding forms and your remittance footer | Every vendor you set up from today |
| Old | Auto-forward the shared ap@ mailbox into an InletAP mailbox | Everyone who has not updated their records, which is most of them, for longer than you expect |
Both paths land in an InletAP mailbox, so both route correctly from the first day. There is no cut-over date, no freeze and no week where invoices are in two places.
Leave the forward running long after you think it is finished. A vendor who bills you annually will use the old address next spring regardless of what you told them this month.
Setting up the forward
Provider menus move around every few months, so what follows describes the settings rather than the clicks. A wrong menu path is worse than a general one.
Gmail and Google Workspace
In the mailbox's forwarding settings, add your InletAP intake address as a forwarding address, then choose to forward incoming mail to it. Decide whether Gmail keeps its own copy — most finance teams keep one, so the original stays where their retention policy expects it.
A Workspace administrator can usually add the same forward centrally for a shared mailbox rather than signing in as it.
Outlook and Microsoft 365
In the mailbox's forwarding settings, enable forwarding to your InletAP intake address and choose whether to keep a copy in the mailbox. An administrator can set the same thing on a shared mailbox from the admin center.
Any other IMAP provider
Every serious mail host has a forwarding or redirect setting somewhere in the mailbox's own configuration. What you want is a straightforward forward of all incoming mail to the InletAP address. Avoid rules that forward only messages matching a subject or an attachment type: invoices arrive with subjects nobody predicted, and a filter that is 95% right quietly loses the other 5%.
The confirmation step
Google and Microsoft both verify a forwarding destination before mail flows to it, usually by sending a code or a confirmation link to that destination. That message arrives at your intake address like any other email.
InletAP judges it not to be an invoice and files it as filtered — set aside before extraction, so it costs nothing against your plan allowance. You will find it in the filtered view of the inbox, listed with its sender, subject and the reason it was set aside. If the code is inside the body rather than the subject line, write to support@inlet-ap.com and we will read it back to you from the stored message.
Which mailbox to forward into
Forward the portfolio-wide ap@ mailbox into your catch-all intake address. If you have created a building-specific mailbox, forward that building's address into it.
ap@yourcompany.com -> ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
lakeshore@yourcompany.com -> lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
That second line is the argument for per-property mailboxes. Mail arriving at a building's address is coded to that building when the invoice itself names nothing recognizable, which covers the depressing number of invoices that identify the property only by a job number the vendor invented.
Checking that it works
Send a real invoice to your old address and watch the inbox in the app. Each mailbox in settings shows whether it is verified, how many messages it has taken in the last thirty days and when the last one arrived, which is the fastest way to tell a silent forward from a quiet week.
Duplicate detection runs at ingest on message ID, attachment fingerprint and a vendor / invoice-number / date / amount heuristic. So a vendor who emails both your old address and your new one, and a colleague who forwards the same message again to be safe, produce one document rather than three.
If nothing appears at all, Why hasn't my invoice appeared? works through the causes in order.
Where to go next
- Intake addresses — what your subdomain is and how mailboxes are issued.
- Per-property mailboxes — when one address per building earns its keep.
- Your first coding rule — including rules on the sender address.
- Why hasn't my invoice appeared? — for when the forward is not doing what you think.