Hooksbase

Channels / August 3, 2026

Send inbound email to AWS SQS (no HTTP endpoint in the middle)

Diagram showing an inbound email routed into a message queue destination

If your consumer already reads from SQS, standing up an HTTP endpoint purely to catch inbound mail and re-publish it is a service you have to deploy, secure, scale, and monitor for no product reason.

This guide routes a parsed email directly into an SQS queue. There is no HTTP hop in the middle.

Typed destinations, including aws_sqs, require Pro or above.

What you end up with

  1. A vendor or customer sends mail to the webhook's generated address.
  2. Hooksbase parses it into structured JSON — sender, subject, bodies, headers, attachments.
  3. The message is written to your SQS queue as a delivery.
  4. If SQS is unreachable, the delivery is retried under the webhook's retry policy and lands in the DLQ if it ultimately fails.

Create the SQS destination

An aws_sqs destination takes the queue URL, its region, and credentials:

{
  "name": "invoices-queue",
  "type": "aws_sqs",
  "config": {
    "queueUrl": "https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123456789012/invoices",
    "region": "us-east-1",
    "accessKeyId": "AKIA...",
    "secretAccessKey": "...",
    "sessionToken": null
  }
}

Create it against the webhook:

curl https://api.hooksbase.com/v1/webhooks/wh_123/destinations \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer swk_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @destination.json

The same thing is available from the dashboard, or through client.webhooks.createDestination() in the SDK and hooksbase webhooks destinations in the CLI.

Credentials are encrypted at rest. Scope the IAM user to sqs:SendMessage on that one queue and nothing else.

Point email at it

If the queue should receive all traffic for this webhook, make it the default destination and you are finished — the email ingest address already routes there.

If the webhook also handles HTTP events and only email should go to SQS, add a routing rule matching on the channel:

{
  "defaultDestinationId": "dest_http",
  "rules": [
    {
      "name": "email-to-sqs",
      "enabled": true,
      "priority": 1,
      "matchMode": "all",
      "destinationId": "dest_invoices_queue",
      "conditions": [
        { "source": "payload.source", "operator": "eq", "value": "email" }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Rules are evaluated by ascending priority and the first enabled match wins. Anything that does not match falls through to the default destination.

Narrow it further

Because rules match on the parsed payload, you can split mail by content rather than just by channel:

{ "source": "payload.subject", "operator": "contains", "value": "Invoice" }

Sources include payload.<path> with dot paths into the parsed JSON, headers.<name>, contentType, and the provider.* metadata from a configured provider pack.

Reshape before it lands

An SQS consumer rarely wants the full parsed email. Add an Automation to pull out the fields that matter — sender, subject, the attachment reference — so the queue carries a small, stable message instead of the whole MIME tree. Transforms run after route selection and before delivery.

Attachments

Attachment files are not written into the queue body. The parsed message carries an attachment entry with a signed fileRef.url your consumer fetches, or you can use the authenticated retrieval endpoint:

GET /v1/webhooks/:webhookId/deliveries/:deliveryId/files/:index
Authorization: Bearer swk_...

Keeping files out of the message body is deliberate — SQS has a message size ceiling well below the 15 MB per-file limit on ingest.

What you get that a forwarder does not

A dedicated inbound email service can also POST to something that writes to SQS. The difference is that here the queue write is the delivery: it is retried under the webhook's policy, recorded in delivery history, replayable from its dispatch snapshot against the configuration that was live at the time, and it lands in the dead-letter path if it ultimately fails.

Where to go next

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