Email Trigger System

A purpose-built subsystem handles inbound email as a first-class trigger, engineered for reliability rather than simple polling. It is decomposed into worker, connection, normalizer, filter, rate-limit, network-guard, alerting, and audit components.

In this guide

Monitoring & connections

• Persistent IMAP IDLE worker with backoff for near-real-time monitoring; POP3 polling and Gmail Pub/Sub webhook integration also supported.
• A connection service manages multiple mailboxes, backed by a secure token vault for credentials.
• Known-provider presets simplify connecting common mailboxes; a multi-provider factory abstracts IMAP / POP3 / Gmail.

Event capture & processing

• Email event capture — subject, from, to, body, and attachments — normalized into a consistent shape for downstream nodes.
• Filter matching so only relevant messages start a workflow.
• Attachment download and embedding into the workflow run; background processing via a job queue.

Safety & observability

• Per-trigger rate limiting and a network guard against abusive or runaway polling.
• Alerting on failures and a dedicated audit log for the subsystem.