Email to Airtable

A lot of structured information still arrives as email: inbound leads, order confirmations, job applications, vendor notifications, form submissions that only email you. Each one is a row you wish were in Airtable — but instead it sits in an inbox waiting to be copied across by hand.

Webhook Relay can receive emails as webhooks. You give an inbox a unique address, every message sent to it is parsed into JSON, and a small transform reshapes it into the format the Airtable Web API expects before delivery — no mail server, no parsing of raw MIME, no polling.

How it works

The whole path is a single hop with a transform in the middle:

inbound email  ──▶  Webhook Relay (parse + transform)  ──▶  Airtable API  ──▶  new record

When an email hits your Webhook Relay address, it's parsed into a structured JSON document and POSTed to the bucket's outputs. The Airtable API doesn't understand that shape — it accepts a { "fields": { ... } } body with a bearer token — so the transform converts one into the other in flight.

The parsed email looks like this:

{
  "from": "[email protected]",
  "from_name": "Jon Snow",
  "recipient": "<uuid>@in.webhookrelay-mail.com",
  "to": ["<uuid>@in.webhookrelay-mail.com"],
  "subject": "New lead: Acme Corp",
  "date": "Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:27:41 +0400",
  "message_id": "<[email protected]>",
  "text": "plain body",
  "html": "<p>html body</p>",
  "spf": "pass",
  "dkim": "pass",
  "dmarc": "pass",
  "attachments": [
    { "name": "resume.pdf", "content_type": "application/pdf", "size": 48213, "content": "<base64>" }
  ]
}

See the full payload reference for every field, including cc and the raw headers map.

Setup

1. Create a bucket. This is the container that ties an input to its outputs.

2. Add an email input. Webhook Relay gives you back a unique address of the form <uuid>@in.webhookrelay-mail.com. Anything sent there is parsed and forwarded to the bucket's outputs.

3. Add an output pointing at the Airtable API. Create an Airtable personal access token with the data.records:write scope, then add an output whose destination is https://api.airtable.com/v0/<BASE_ID>/<TABLE_NAME>. Put the credentials in the output's headers: Authorization: Bearer <your-token> and Content-Type: application/json.

4. Attach the transform. Add the transform function below so the parsed email is reshaped into an Airtable record before it's delivered.

5. Send a test email. Email your <uuid>@in.webhookrelay-mail.com address from any client. Within a second or two a new row appears in your table. If it doesn't, open the request log in your dashboard to see exactly what was received and delivered.

The transform

Webhook Relay functions hand you the incoming request body as a string in r.body. Parse it, build the Airtable payload, and write it back with r.setBody:

const e = JSON.parse(r.body);

r.setBody(JSON.stringify({
  fields: {
    From: e.from,
    Subject: e.subject,
    Body: e.text,
    Received: e.date
  }
}));

r.setHeader("Authorization", "Bearer " + "YOUR_AIRTABLE_TOKEN");
r.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/json");

That's the complete bridge: the sender, subject, body and date become a single Airtable record. Each key under fields must match a column in your table and use a compatible value type (single line text, long text, date, single select). For cleaner data, prefer e.from_name over e.from for a display name, and trim or truncate e.text if your column has limits.

To handle attachments, remember each entry in e.attachments carries base64 content — upload it to your own storage first, then put the resulting URL in an Airtable attachment field, since Airtable fetches attachments by URL.

In production, keep the token in the output's configured headers rather than hardcoding it in the function, so it never lives in your transform source.

Get started

Turning inbound mail into Airtable records is one case of a broader pattern: Email to Webhook. Once an email is JSON, you can route it anywhere a webhook can go.

Create a free Webhook Relay account, add an email input, and have leads, orders and applications flowing into Airtable in a few minutes.