Intake addresses

An intake address is where invoices enter inletAP. This page is about what an address is: where it lives, what it decides, what it cannot do, and how to tell that one is working. Creating one is a short procedure with a screen of its own — per-property mailboxes walks it — so it is not repeated here.

Your intake domain

Your workspace is issued its own subdomain of inlet-ap.com when it is created, and every intake mailbox lives on it:

invoices@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com

The address works from the moment it is created. These addresses live on a domain inletAP controls, so there is no DNS record to add, no verification to pass and no propagation to wait out before a vendor can send to it.

The part left of the @ is yours to choose, within the characters a sane mailbox name uses. The dialog accepts lower case letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores, and the address has to start and end with a letter or a number; the whole local part may be up to 64 characters. The part right of the @ is not negotiable — an address on any other domain is refused, which is what stops one workspace claiming another's mail.

Choose the address carefully, because a mailbox is permanent. It cannot be renamed, switched off or deleted: there is no route in the product that removes one. That is deliberate — an address a vendor used last year should still take their mail this year — but it does mean a typo stays in the list for good.

Who can add one, and how many

Only an Admin can add a mailbox. Everyone else can read the list and sees the reason beside a disabled button, which is also deliberate: the addresses are the first thing a new AP specialist needs, and they should be able to see what to ask for.

The Free plan includes the one mailbox your workspace was issued at sign-up. A second one needs a paid plan, and paid plans do not cap them. See plans and limits.

The procedure — the dialog, its three fields and what each one decides — is in per-property mailboxes.

Checking that an address is live

An intake address has no status light, because it has no status: it accepts mail from the moment it exists. What you actually want to know is whether anything is arriving at it. Three checks, in the order they are worth doing.

1. Copy the address from the list. Use the Copy button on the row under Settings → Mailboxes rather than retyping it. A mailbox that never takes any mail is usually a typo somewhere else.
2. Send it a real invoice and open Inbox. It arrives as its own row under the vendor's name, usually within a minute or two. If it does not, why hasn't my invoice appeared? works through the causes in order.
3. Read the row back on the Mailboxes tab. Each address shows how many messages it has taken since it was created and when the last one arrived. Both numbers move as soon as mail is accepted.

The count is a lifetime total rather than a rolling window. The date beside it is the more useful of the two: an address you handed to twelve vendors six months ago whose last message is dated in March is telling you that those vendors are still sending somewhere else, which is a question worth asking before month end rather than during it.

One address, or one per property

Most companies start with a single catch-all and add property addresses when the routing is worth the administration.

You can mix the two. A catch-all for general suppliers and dedicated addresses for the buildings with their own vendor lists is a common and sensible shape.

The question is not how many buildings you have; it is where the routing information lives. If the address a vendor used already answers "which building is this?", an address per property earns its keep. If the invoice names the building and your property aliases recognize it, one address is less to maintain than fifty forwards at your mail provider.

What an address decides, and what it does not

A mailbox can fill in the property. When a mailbox is associated with a property, mail arriving there is coded to that property if the invoice itself names nothing your aliases recognize. This is a fallback and not an override: what the invoice says about itself always wins. A vendor who sends a Maple Street invoice to the Lakeshore address has made an addressing mistake rather than a coding decision, and treating the address as the final word would quietly turn one mistake into a wrong journal entry.

The address is visible to the rules engine. Intake mailbox is a condition field with the operators is and contains, so a rule can act on where mail arrived rather than only on who sent it:

Intake mailbox contains "lakeshore@"

Written with the local part alone, the rule survives any later change to how you name things. The full vocabulary is in the rules reference. The rules engine begins at the Starter plan.

A plus tag does not create a mailbox. Mail sent to either of these arrives in the same place:

ap+lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com

Inbound mail is resolved by address: the exact address is tried first, and when nothing matches, the +tag is stripped and the base address is tried. That is standard mail behavior rather than a decision on our part, and it is worth knowing because a plus tag looks like routing and is not. If you want Lakeshore mail handled separately, create a lakeshore@ mailbox. If you want it merely marked, write a rule.

Mail sent to a domain you own

inletAP cannot receive mail addressed to ap@yourcompany.com, and neither can any other vendor of this kind. Routing for a domain you own is decided by your DNS records and your mail provider, and inletAP only receives mail on domains it controls.

The way in is auto-forwarding. Set a forwarding rule at your own provider from the address you already publish into the inletAP mailbox that should handle it. Vendors keep using the address they have, the mail arrives here, and nothing has to be announced to anyone.

The destination mailbox decides the default routing, so this works per property as well: forward lakeshore-ap@yourcompany.com to lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com and that building's mail lands where it belongs. Forwarded mail arrives with the inletAP address as its envelope recipient, so to treat it differently once it is here, write a rule on the sending address rather than on the address it was originally sent to.

The full procedure, provider by provider, is in email forwarding.

What to publish

Two waves, run at the same time, get you to full coverage without a migration project.

Chasing every vendor to change their records is the part of this that never finishes, so it is better not to depend on it. Forwarding covers the ones who never get round to it, and both routes land in an inletAP mailbox, so both are processed identically.

One practical note: put the address on the document vendors actually read. An address in the footer of a contract is not the address their accounts receivable clerk will use.

Where to go next

• Per-property mailboxes — creating an address, step by step, and when one per building pays for itself.
• Email forwarding — bring your existing AP mailbox in without telling anyone.
• Rules reference — including the intake mailbox condition.
• Plans and limits — mailbox counts and what each plan includes.