Trigger an IFTTT Applet with an Email

Postbox's Quick Post feature enables you to quickly set up and use send-to-service email addresses, and automatically add the appropriate tags to the beginning or end of the subject line. Best of all, you can send content to the service in the background, without having to open up a compose window.

With IFTTT, you can send emails directly to IFTTT to trigger an applet using the IFTTT trigger email address. Control your smart home devices, save emails and attachments to storage, or any other email triggered IFTTT applets, and be more productive.

The IFTTT email address

The IFTTT email address is [email protected]. Emails to this email address will trigger your set applets. Emails to this address with tags, e.g., #IFTTT, will trigger specific applets.

Create your Quick Post

In Postbox, navigate to Preferences or Options > Advanced > Quick Post and then click the + button to create a new Quick Post.

Create a name for the Quick Post, then enter the IFTTT email address.

You can add tags at the beginning or end of your subject line, corresponding to the applet trigger tags set up in IFTTT, to specify which applets you would like to trigger.

Specify how the message should be sent

Send As Attachment is usually the best way to go since you're forwarding the original email. Services can then do the right thing with regards to images as attachments, for instance.

Send should be used when the service doesn't know how to process .eml files as attachments, like Trello or Slack. However, it does have some limitations. For example, images embedded into the message body as an IMAP URL won't show in the destination.

Send via Compose Window will bring up the Compose Window, which you can then edit before sending. This option is also the best one to use for images embedded into the message body as an IMAP URL.

Automatic email filtering or forwarding

You can also set up Postbox's email filters to automatically trigger a Quick Post when you receive an email from a specific sender or with a particular subject.

For example, you can configure Postbox to quick post any emails sent from "Co-worker A" with "Product Update" in the subject line to your general mailing list.

To set this up, go to Postbox's Tools menu > Message Filters > New, set your filter criteria, then for the action select Quick Post and then your desired Quick Post.

But note that messages are always sent As Attachment when using a filter action because, by their nature, filter actions run in the background. So be sure to select "Send as Attachment" within the editor panel for this Quick Post.