Airtable automation trigger: When email received

  • Updated on Jun 24, 2025
  • Published on Jan 29, 2025
  • 1 minute(s) read
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Plan availability

Business and Enterprise Scale plans only with varying limitations

Permissions

  • Owner / Creator - Create, delete, duplicate, configure, or rename an automation and edit an automation's description.

  • Editor - View an automation's configuration or copy an automation's URL.

Platform(s)

Web/Browser, Mac app, and Windows app

Note
Consider having Omni create an automation for you. With Omni's AI capabilities, you can use plain text requests to build, update, and query in your Airtable base.

Learn how to use the "When email received" trigger to trigger an automation to run when an email is email is received by the automation.

Creating an email received automation

  1. Open your Airtable home screen.

  2. Open the base where you want to create an automation.

  3. Click Automations.

  4. Click + Create new.

  5. Click + Create automation.

  6. Click + Add trigger.

    1. Once clicked, the available triggers will display for you to choose from.

  7. Select the When email received option.

  8. To continue the setup process, you may now send an email to the email address generated in the previous step.

    1. After sending the email you may click the “Test Trigger” button to confirm that the email was received and that the parsed output matched what you sent

  9. Again, be sure to test all of the steps in the automation that you are building. Once every part of the automation has tested successfully, you’ll likely be ready to turn the automation on. Find the red colored “OFF” toggle and click it so the automation now appears as “ON” in green.

FAQs

Can I send a reply to emails received via this automation?

Yes, you can use our Gmail: Send Email or Send Email automation actions to reply to the sender of the email by including the “Email ID” field from the trigger in the “In reply to” input of the Send Email actions.

Can I receive attachments via this automation?

Yes, attachments will be received and made available via an expiringDownloadUrl that is available for 2 hours after the email is received.

If you would like to keep the attachment for longer, you may write the expiringDownloadUrl into an Attachment Field in your base to save the attachment.

Are there any limits on the size of the email that can be sent?

Yes, we currently do not support emails larger than a total of 30MB in size including attachments.