Receiving emails

Turn on receiving

1. Open the domain in Domains. It must be provisioned, in a region where Amazon SES receives mail.
2. On the Records tab, turn on Enable Receiving.
3. Add the MX record shown in that section at your DNS provider.

The MX record sends all mail for that name to SES. It replaces whatever mail provider the name uses today, such as Google Workspace. If people already receive mail at the domain, turn on receiving for a subdomain (for example inbound.example.com) instead, so the existing mailbox keeps working.

How mail arrives

SES stores each incoming message in a temporary S3 bucket in your AWS account and notifies your installation. Opensend copies the message into its own storage, deletes it from S3, parses it, and fires email.received. S3 is only a drop box, not an archive.

Read received mail in Emails → Receiving (see manage received emails) or through the API with a full-access key:

curl "$OPENSEND_BASE_URL/emails/receiving" -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENSEND_API_KEY"

Things to know

• A raw message can be up to 40 MiB.
• Messages, decoded bodies, attachments, and raw files are deleted after 30 days.
• Turning receiving off removes the domain's SES receipt rule. Mail already stored stays until it expires.