How to Receive Inbound Email in Salesforce.com

Inbound email services is an exciting new capability of Salesforce.com that allows Salesforce.com Orgs to receive and automatically parse the contents of inbound emails. This opens up a wealth of really exciting integration and automation possibilities.

Salesforce.com email services are automated processes that use Apex classes to process the contents, headers, and attachments of inbound email. For example, you can create an email service that automatically creates contact records based on contact information in messages.

You can associate each email service with one or more Salesforce-generated email addresses to which users can send messages for processing.

To allow multiple users to use a single email service, you can associate multiple Salesforce-generated email addresses with the email service, and allocate those addresses to users; or associate a single Salesforce-generated email address with the email service, and write an Apex class that executes according to the user accessing the email service. For example, you can write an Apex class that identifies the user based on the user's email address, and creates records on behalf of that user.

To begin using email services in Salesforce.com:

1. Click Setup | Develop | Email Services.
2. Click New Email Service to define a new email service.
3. Select an existing email service to view its configuration, activate or deactivate it, and view or specify addresses for that email service.
4. Click Edit to make changes to an existing email service.
5. Click Del to delete an email service.

Have fun,
Surfwriter, Inc.