Forward email to a Discord channel

Discord cannot receive email

Plenty of communities and small teams run on Discord rather than Slack, and plenty of the things they care about still arrive by email: store orders, uptime alerts, form submissions, sponsorship enquiries, a game server host's billing notices. Discord has no email integration, so someone ends up copy-pasting from a mailbox into a channel.

Discord does have webhooks — a URL that posts into one channel. MXcatch sits on the email side: your domain's MX records point at us, an alias like alerts@your-domain.com receives the mail, and a Discord action posts each message through the webhook.

Setting up email to Discord

1. Create a webhook in Discord. Open Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook, choose the channel, and click Copy Webhook URL. You need the Manage Webhooks permission on the server.
2. Add your domain to MXcatch and point its MX records at us. Per-provider instructions.
3. Create an alias — alerts, orders, whatever goes before the @.
4. Add the action. Go to Domains → your domain → the alias → + Add action, choose Discord, and paste the webhook URL.

Send a test email to the alias. It appears in the channel within a few seconds.

What a post looks like

Each email becomes one Discord message with an embed:

• Title — the email's subject.
• Description — a text preview of the body, the first ~2,000 characters.
• From and To fields, so you can tell which alias it was sent to.
• Timestamp — when the email was received.

Attachments

Files attached to the email are uploaded into the Discord message, so a PDF invoice or a screenshot is right there in the channel. Discord limits a message to 10 files and about 24 MB in total. When an email goes over that, the remaining attachments are posted as download links, which expire after 7 days.

The full email as an image or PDF

A 2,000-character preview is enough for an alert, not for a newsletter or an HTML order confirmation. Turn on Also save as in the action and choose JPG, PDF or both. MXcatch renders the email — a header block with From, To, Date and Subject, then the body as it looks in the inbox — and attaches the result to the post. The JPG shows up inline in Discord, so people can read the whole message without opening anything. See email to JPG and email to PDF for how the rendering works.

Useful arrangements

One address per channel

A Discord webhook posts to a single channel, so routing is a matter of which alias holds which webhook. orders@ to #orders, alerts@ to #ops, apply@ to a private #applications channel only moderators can see.

Discord plus a real mailbox

Actions run independently. Add a forward action next to the Discord one and the email also lands in a normal mailbox where someone can reply to it.

Only the emails that matter

A channel that gets every newsletter gets muted. Routing rules let you post only messages whose subject contains down, or that come from your payment provider's domain, and leave the rest in the inbox.

Using Slack instead?

The same setup works for Slack with an incoming webhook — see email to Slack. If you want the email as structured JSON for your own bot rather than a post for humans, use a webhook action.