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Setup Intake Emails with OwlRelay

This guide will show you how to setup Papra to receive emails using OwlRelay.

OwlRelay is an open-source agnostic email-to-http service developed by the Papra team. It’s a free service that allows you to receive emails and forward them to your self-hosted Papra instance.

Prerequisites

In order to follow this guide, your Papra instance needs to be running and accessible from the internet.

How it works

By integrating Papra with OwlRelay, your instance will generate email addresses on OwlRelay through it’s API (specifying a webhook on your Papra instance). And OwlRelay will forward the emails to your Papra instance through a webhook.

How it works

Setup

  1. Create an account on OwlRelay

    Go to owlrelay.email and create an account.

  2. Create an OwlRelay API key

    Once you have created your account, you can create an API key by going to the API keys page.

    OwlRelay API keys page

  3. Configure your Papra instance

    Once you have created your API key, you can configure your Papra instance to receive emails by setting the OWLRELAY_API_KEY and OWLRELAY_WEBHOOK_SECRET environment variables.

    Terminal window
    # Enable intake emails
    INTAKE_EMAILS_IS_ENABLED=true
    

    # Tell your Papra instance to use OwlRelay
    INTAKE_EMAILS_DRIVER=owlrelay
    

    # This is your OwlRelay API key
    OWLRELAY_API_KEY=owrl_*****
    

    # Set a random key that will be transmitted to OwlRelay to sign the requests,
    # this is to authenticate that the emails are coming from OwlRelay
    INTAKE_EMAILS_WEBHOOK_SECRET=a-random-key
    

    # [Optional]
    # This is the URL that OwlRelay will send the emails to,
    # if not provided, the webhook will be inferred from the server URL.
    # Can be relevant if you have multiple urls pointing to your Papra instance
    # or when using tunnel services
    OWLRELAY_WEBHOOK_URL=https://your-instance.com/api/intake-emails/ingest

  4. That’s it!

    You can now generate intake emails in your Papra instance and send emails with attachments to the email address generated.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any issues, you can:

  • Check the logs of your Papra instance to see if there are any errors.
  • Connect to your OwlRelay account to see if the emails address are generated and emails are received.