Inbound Email Processing Checklist for E-commerce

Use patterns like vendor+{vendor_id}@yourdomain to isolate flows, simplify routing, and track sender performance across marketplaces. This reduces cross-vendor contamination when parsing order confirmations.

Reserve tags such as orders, returns, cancellations, and invoices to signal downstream workflows. This makes rule-based routing trivial in webhook handlers and REST polling jobs.

Assign separate mailboxes for Amazon, eBay, and Walmart to keep rate limits and spikes contained. It also enables per-channel SLOs and queues.

Allow only known vendor domains and transactional addresses to pass, sending unknown senders to quarantine with minimal retention. This protects parsing pipelines from unsolicited content.

Reject messages above a safe threshold and inform vendors to provide links instead of heavy attachments. This prevents API timeouts and clogged parsing queues.

Use webhooks for real-time order flows and polling for low-priority archives or compliance mailboxes. Selecting the right pattern keeps latency low without overprovisioning.

Score authentication results and require alignment for trusted vendors before triggering fulfillment automations. Failing messages should be quarantined with sender feedback.

Record expected MX hosts and certificate fingerprints for key partners to mitigate spoofing. Fall back to ARC evaluation for forwarded messages from helpdesk tools.

Validate signatures on every delivery, rotate secrets quarterly, and reject unsigned requests. Add IP allowlists and TLS enforcement for defense in depth.

Store raw MIME and parsed JSON with encryption and scrub names, phone numbers, and addresses from logs. Limit access via least privilege roles.

Run antivirus scanning and transform risky file types to PDF or text before parsing. Block macros and executable content to protect downstream systems.

Throttle noisy vendors, queue excess messages, and move timeouts to a dead-letter queue for later investigation. This prevents cascaded failures in parsing services.

Parse both text/plain and text/html parts, decode quoted-printable and base64, and standardize to UTF-8. Preserve inline images and Content-ID references for later extraction.

Build parsers for common vendors to pull order_id, purchase_date, totals, buyer info, and shipping data. Validate against a strict JSON schema before routing.

Canonicalize country codes, format phone numbers to E.164, and convert totals to a store currency with captured FX rates. This ensures clean ingestion into OMS and ERP.

Extract SKU, quantity, price, and tax from tables, CSVs, and PDFs, using OCR when vendors send rasterized receipts. Map vendor SKUs to internal catalog IDs.

Use Message-ID, In-Reply-To, and References to link return requests or shipment updates back to the original order. Update state rather than creating duplicates.

Persist the original email and a normalized JSON document with versioned schemas. Re-run failed messages after parser updates without contacting vendors.

Dispatch parsed JSON via webhook to order management for fulfillment, warehouse systems for picking, and support tools for exceptions. Include headers for tenant and channel.

Derive a stable key from vendor order_id and the email Message-ID hash to prevent duplicate order creation on retries. Enforce at the API boundary and downstream services.

Route failures to a review queue with reasons, redacted samples, and a one-click reprocess action. Notify channel owners for urgent orders.

Detect RMA keywords and vendor forms, extract item and reason codes, and open an RMA in your returns system with SLA tags. Attach the email JSON for audit.

Join SKU to product metadata, validate tax breakdowns, and fix common vendor code mismatches. Emit a consolidated JSON payload to eliminate post-ingestion cleanup.

Respect List-Id and Precedence headers, ignore bulk and auto-generated notices, and add loop detection via Auto-Submitted checks. Only send replies when workflows require it.

Collect examples for top partners, including edge cases with unusual charsets, inline images, and multipart alternatives. Use them in CI to prevent parser regressions.

Send known patterns daily and verify webhook deliveries, JSON structure, and downstream record creation. Page on deviation from baseline latency or schema.

Track 2xx rates, 4xx/5xx distributions, and retry counts with exponential backoff. Expose dashboards and alerts keyed by vendor, inbox, and message type.

Set targets like 95th percentile under 60 seconds for orders and under 5 minutes for returns. Tie error budgets to deployment gates for parser changes.

Store hashes, timestamps, and routing decisions for at least one year to resolve chargebacks and channel audits. Provide vendor-facing evidence without exposing PII.

Share guidelines for subject lines, consistent order identifiers, and attachment types to reduce parsing ambiguity. Include a sandbox inbox for verification before go-live.