Receiving email

Every Shopify store that uses Mechanic has its own, dedicated email address, named after the store's myshopify.com subdomain and located at mail.usemechanic.com. A store at example.myshopify.com would be assigned the address fantastic@mail.usemechanic.com.

Event data

All Mechanic email, both inbound and outbound, is powered by Postmark. As such, we leave parsing of incoming emails to Postmark, and we pass the results on to you. Refer to Postmark's email parsing guide to see how Postmark thinks about this – the data you receive in Mechanic is as you see in that documentation, with one difference: where Postmark uses keys like "ReplyTo" and "HtmlBody", Mechanic uses keys like "reply_to" and "html_body".

Specifically, you'll have access to these attributes:

• "attachments" – an array, containing objects with the keys "name", "content", "content_type", "content_length", and "content_id"
• "cc" – a string containing the full "CC" list, including names and email addresses
• "cc_full" – an array, containing objects with the keys "email", "name", and "mailbox_hash"
• "date" – an ISO8601 string indicating when the email was received by Postmark; use this with the "date" filter
• "from" – a string containing the email address of the sender
• "from_full" – an object with the keys "email", "name", and "mailbox_hash"
• "from_name" – a string containing the name of the sender
• "headers" – an array, containing objects with the keys "name" and "value"
• "html_body" – a string, containing the HTML email body
• "message_id" – a string that uniquely identifies this message; include this when contacting support
• "reply_to" – a string, containing the reply-to address
• "stripped_text_reply" – a string, containing Postmark's attempt at isolating only the reply portion of an email; see the "StrippedTextReply" section of Postmark's documentation
• "subject" – a string! :)
• "text_body" – a string, containing the plaintext email body
• "to" – a string containing the full "To" list, including names and email addresses
• "to_full" – an array, containing objects with the keys "email", "name", and "mailbox_hash"

Building a task that receives email

As with all things in Mechanic, receiving email starts with an event. Here, you'll use the event topic "mechanic/emails/received".

To start experimenting with receiving emails, create a task that subscribes to "mechanic/emails/received", and that has this single line for its script:

{% action "echo" email %}

Then, send an email to your Mechanic account.

Once the first email is received, your task preview (the right-hand column of the task editor) will start generating previews based on that most recent email event. This frees you to start experimenting with using different email values. For example, try something like this:

{% assign body = email.text_body | strip %}
{% action "echo" email_body: body %}