WeTransform Import by email

Import by email

Every email source gets its own address. Send a mail to it — with your file attached, or with the data in the body — and WeTransform picks it up and transforms it. No integration, no credentials, no scheduled job.

When should I use this?

When the data already arrives by email. A supplier who mails you a price list every Monday, a tool that emails a nightly export, a colleague who sends a spreadsheet — anything you currently download from a mail and re-upload by hand. Point the mail at WeTransform instead and the re-upload step disappears.

Setup

1. Choose the email location

When configuring a source, pick Email as the location. An address is generated immediately and shown to you — that address belongs to this source and nothing else.

2. Send your first mail

Send a mail to the address, with your file attached. The page updates as soon as it arrives — you do not need to reload or wait on a schedule.

3. Tell us what to read

A mail can carry several things. Pick whether the data is the body of the mail or one of its attachments — see What we read. That choice is remembered and applied to every later mail.

Your address

An address looks like this:

K3P9XQ@parse.wetransform.com

The six characters in front are what identifies your source. You can add a readable suffix after a dash, and both of these arrive at exactly the same place: 

K3P9XQ-supplier-prices@parse.wetransform.com
K3P9XQ-monday-export@parse.wetransform.com
The suffix is yours to use. Routing looks only at the six characters, so you can write whatever helps you recognise the address later — in your address book, in a filter, in a forwarding rule. Capitalisation does not matter either.

What we read

Three options, chosen once and reused for every mail that follows.

The body of the mail

For senders that paste CSV or plain text straight into the message. Nothing needs to be attached.

The first attachment

The common case. Use it when every mail carries exactly one file, whatever it happens to be called — filenames dated export-2026-08-01.csv are no problem.

A named attachment

Use it when mails arrive with several attachments — a report plus a logo, a PDF invoice alongside the CSV — and only one of them is the data. We pick the one matching the name you give.

Automate it

Once the source is attached to a transformation and the mailbox is enabled, every mail that arrives runs the whole transformation on its own: content extracted, file normalised, rules applied, result delivered. You are not in the loop any more.

The setup worth aiming for

Create a rule in your own mail client that automatically forwards the messages you care about to the generated address — "from supplier@example.com with an attachment", say. From then on the supplier mails you, your client forwards, and the transformed file is waiting for you. Nobody touches anything.

Usage hints

  • Forward automatically rather than by hand. Every mail client can do it — Gmail filters, Outlook rules, Apple Mail rules. Match on the sender and forward to your address; that single rule is what turns this from "somewhere to send files" into an integration.
  • Give each source a suffix you will recognise. K3P9XQ-acme-prices@parse.wetransform.com tells you at a glance which one you are looking at when you have five of them in a filter list.
  • Let the supplier mail you directly. The address is not secret in the way a password is — you can hand it to whoever produces the file and skip the forwarding step entirely. Anyone who has it can feed this source, so treat it like an inbox address: fine to share with a partner, not worth publishing on a website.
  • Use "the first attachment" unless you have to be picky. It survives senders who change their filenames every day, which is most of them. Reach for the named attachment only when a mail genuinely carries more than one file.
  • Send a real mail as your test. The best rehearsal is the message you will actually receive later — forward a genuine one from the supplier rather than an empty draft, so the attachment layout is the real thing.

What gets ignored

  • A mail to an address that does not exist. If the six-character part matches no source — a typo, or a source that has since been deleted — the mail is dropped. There is no bounce, so check the address carefully when nothing seems to arrive.
  • A mail with nothing in it. No body and no attachment means nothing to transform; it is recorded in the history as ignored.
  • An automated mail before you have chosen what to read. The mailbox needs to know whether the data is the body or an attachment. Send one mail interactively and make the choice first; automation works from then on.

History & retention

Every mail received is kept with its status — processed, ignored or failed — so you can check what arrived and when. Messages are retained for 90 days.

An address stays valid for as long as its source exists; it does not expire and it does not rotate. An address generated but never attached to a source is reclaimed after ten days.

© 2026