Email your agent
Some of the people who should be able to start a run will never have a Cotera login: customers, vendors, candidates, partners. They can't post in your Slack or call your API, but they can email. An email trigger gives an agent you already built an address of its own, and anything that lands there becomes the input to a run.
It's the same shape as a webhook trigger: an event arrives, a workflow runs on its payload. The difference is that the sender doesn't need to be a system you integrated with. They just need your address.
Set it up
- Open your workflow, click Add trigger, and choose Email.
- Name the trigger. Cotera mints the address from that name and shows it on the trigger card, ready to copy:
deals-k3f9x2@inbound.cotera.ai. - Save, then hit Trigger now. Cotera synthesizes a sample
email.receivedpayload, so you can watch the run end to end and confirm the downstream nodes bind the fields you expect before anyone has your address. - Hand the address out. More often, you'll add a rule in Gmail or Outlook that auto-forwards anything matching a filter to it.
What the run receives
Cotera normalizes every delivery into the same object before your workflow touches it, whether the sender wrote plain text, rich HTML, or forwarded a thread six replies deep.
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
matchedAddress | The trigger address this delivery resolved to |
from | The sender, display name included |
to · cc | The visible headers, as sent |
subject | The subject line |
text · html | The body, both ways |
attachments | Filenames only, enough to branch on what was sent |
spf · dkim · spamScore | Authentication results, so you can refuse to act on mail that failed |
messageId | The Message-ID header, for threading a reply onto the original |
Things to know
- The address is the credential. Inbound email carries no signature, so anyone who knows the address can start the run. That's why Cotera appends a random suffix rather than handing out
deals@. Treat it like a webhook URL: don't publish it anywhere you wouldn't publish a secret. - Recipients come from the SMTP envelope, not the
To:header. A BCC still fires the trigger, and one message addressed to two trigger addresses starts both runs. - Duplicate deliveries are skipped. A delivery whose payload is identical to one already seen for that trigger within the last hour doesn't start a second run, so an upstream retry never means two deals or two tickets.
- Attachments are filenames, not contents. The pipeline captures the names so you can branch on them; it doesn't persist the file bodies. Messages up to 30MB are accepted.
- Mail to an address that matches no enabled trigger is dropped silently. Disabling a trigger stops the runs but doesn't bounce the sender, so retire an address on your side too if people are still writing to it.
- The reply doesn't have to be email. The agent that read the message can enrich the sender, write the CRM record, post to Slack, or answer on the thread, whichever the job calls for.
The marketing overview, with worked examples of what teams forward, lives at cotera.co/email.