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Inbound email to webhook: the dedicated services, and where Hooksbase differs.
CloudMailin, SendGrid Inbound Parse, Postmark inbound, and Mailgun Routes all receive email and POST a parsed version to an endpoint you nominate, and all four retry a failed POST; the difference with Hooksbase is that email is one of four ingest channels feeding a single delivery engine, so a message can be routed to typed cloud destinations and replayed later against the configuration that was live when it arrived.
These are good products. If inbound email parsing is the whole problem, a dedicated service is a perfectly sensible answer, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Where the line actually falls
It would be easy to claim the dedicated services just hand you one HTTP POST and walk away. That is not true, and it is worth correcting: all four retry. Mailgun backs off across roughly eight hours, Postmark makes ten attempts over about ten and a half hours with a manual retry available afterwards, SendGrid keeps trying for seventy-two hours, and CloudMailin retries on 5xx while keeping thirty days of searchable history. The real difference is scope. They are email-shaped, and what they deliver to is an HTTP endpoint. Hooksbase treats email as one of four ingest channels — HTTP, email, form, cron — that all resolve into the same delivery engine, which is what makes typed cloud destinations, snapshot replay, and one shared operational view possible across channels.
The tools in this category
Public pricing and documentation as of 2026-08.
A developer-focused inbound and outbound email API. Receives mail on a custom or generated address and POSTs a parsed representation to your endpoint.
The strongest operational story of the four. Retries on 5xx, keeps thirty days of history with full-text search, records every delivery attempt, and stores the first part of a failed response body so you can see what your server actually said.
Free at 10,000 emails/month (512 KB per message); Starter $25/mo at 10,000 (2 MB); Professional $45/mo at 20,000 (10 MB); Premium $85/mo at 40,000 (50 MB); Corporate $200–$1,799/mo.
A feature of SendGrid that accepts mail for a domain you point at it and POSTs the parsed message to a configured URL.
The longest retry window of the group — roughly every five to ten minutes for the first hour, then about every three hours out to seventy-two hours. If you already send through SendGrid, inbound arrives with no new vendor.
Bundled with SendGrid plans rather than sold separately.
Postmark’s inbound stream. Mail sent to a generated or custom address is parsed and delivered to your inbound webhook URL.
Ten retries over roughly ten and a half hours, and — unusually for this group — a manual retry you can trigger from the account afterwards, so a longer outage is recoverable rather than lost.
Included with Postmark sending plans.
Mailgun’s rule-based inbound routing. Routes match on recipient or headers and forward the message to a URL or another address.
Expressive matching rules on the way in, and a predictable retry ladder at 10 minutes, 10, 15, 30, then 1, 2 and 4 hours.
Part of Mailgun plans rather than a standalone product.
Capability comparison
| Capability | Hooksbase | CloudMailin | SendGrid Inbound Parse | Postmark inbound | Mailgun Routes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Parses inbound mail into structured fields | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Retries a failed POST to your endpoint | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Attachments handled and retrievable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Searchable history of what arrived | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Partial |
| Documented manual re-run once retries are exhausted | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| Replay against the configuration live at the time | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Same pipeline as HTTP, form, and cron events | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Deliver to SQS, EventBridge, Pub/Sub, or object storage | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Signed outbound delivery to your endpoint | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial |
| Versioned transforms before your consumer sees it | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Rule-based routing on the parsed message | Yes | Partial | No | No | Yes |
| Dedicated outbound email sending | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
None of these are email senders’ replacements, and neither are we.
Every product on this page also sends email, and several are primarily sending services with inbound attached. Hooksbase does not send email at all — it receives it. If you need transactional sending, you are keeping one of these regardless, and the question becomes whether inbound should live in the same place as your other event sources or next to your outbound mail.
- • Inbound email is the only non-HTTP source you have, and you do not expect that to change.
- • You already send transactional mail through SendGrid, Postmark, or Mailgun and want inbound in the same account with no new vendor.
- • You need mailbox-shaped features — catch-all addresses across many custom domains, or full-text search over message bodies as a product feature.
- • Your volume sits comfortably inside a free or low tier of a service you already pay for.
- • The consumer is a single HTTP endpoint you control, and a retry window of a few hours is enough.
- • Email is one of several ways events arrive, and you would rather not run a separate service per channel.
- • A message needs to reach SQS, EventBridge, Pub/Sub, or object storage rather than an HTTP endpoint you have to build.
- • You need to replay a message weeks later, against the routing and transform configuration that was live when it arrived.
- • You want one delivery history covering email, HTTP webhooks, form posts, and scheduled runs rather than four dashboards.
- • The parsed message needs reshaping by a versioned transform before your consumer sees it.
- • A failed message should land somewhere you can inspect and re-drive in bulk, not expire out of a retry window.
See it on your own events
The free plan covers 5,000 deliveries a month with no card. Point one source at it and compare the delivery history against what you have today.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the best way to turn inbound email into a webhook?
- If email is your only non-HTTP source, a dedicated inbound service such as CloudMailin, SendGrid Inbound Parse, Postmark inbound, or Mailgun Routes will do it well. If email is one of several channels feeding the same consumer, a single event layer that also handles HTTP, forms, and cron avoids running a separate service and a separate history per channel.
- Do inbound email services retry a failed webhook?
- Yes, all four do, though the windows differ. Mailgun retries across roughly eight hours, Postmark makes ten attempts over about ten and a half hours, SendGrid keeps trying for seventy-two hours, and CloudMailin retries on 5xx responses. Note that SendGrid treats a 4xx, 3xx, or DNS error as permanent and drops the message immediately.
- What happens after the retry window closes?
- With most of these, the message is dropped — and with SendGrid the original sender receives no bounce and there is no dashboard alert, so you would only notice in your own logs. Postmark is the exception and allows a manual retry afterwards. In Hooksbase a message that exhausts retries lands in the dead-letter path, where it can be inspected, exported, and re-driven in bulk.
- Can Hooksbase send email as well as receive it?
- No. Hooksbase receives email as an ingest channel and delivers the resulting event onward. It is not a transactional sending service, so if you send mail you will keep whichever provider does that today.
- Can an inbound email end up somewhere other than an HTTP endpoint?
- In Hooksbase, yes — an email-sourced event uses the same typed destinations as every other channel, so it can be delivered to AWS SQS, EventBridge, GCP Pub/Sub, or S3-compatible storage. Non-HTTP destinations require Pro or above. The dedicated inbound services deliver to an HTTP endpoint or forward to another address.
- Do I need custom domains for inbound email?
- Hooksbase issues a permanent generated address per webhook of the form hook_xyz@ingest.hooksbase.com, and you can forward mail to it from a domain you already control. If you specifically need many custom receiving domains with catch-all addressing managed as a first-class feature, the dedicated services handle that more directly.