Email

The email channel ingests your inbound emails and lets a pipeline reply, forward, or create downstream tasks.

Model

Two complementary modules:

email_inbound — reception (IMAP)
email_outbound — sending (configured operator, or relay via your SMTP)

They are independent: you can use only the inbound module (to triage without replying), or only the outbound module (to send notifications from a pipeline triggered another way).

Setup

Administration → Email → Mailboxes — connect an IMAP mailbox with its credentials.
Map the mailbox to a target pipeline.
(Optional) Configure a sender (SMTP) to reply.

For architectures that need to retain control of their mail servers, betool does not replace your MTA: we read and write via standard IMAP / SMTP.

What the pipeline receives

For each inbound email, a new exchange is created with:

exchange.user_message — email body (HTML → normalized text)
exchange.email.subject — subject line
exchange.email.from — normalized sender
exchange.email.thread_id — thread identifier (useful for multi-turn context)
exchange.email.attachments — list of FileMetadata (parsed attachments)

Attachments are passed to the file_transform node for extraction (plain text, OCR for scanned PDFs, structured parsing for CSV / Excel). From there, your agent can work with them as if they were native text.

Threads & multi-turn context

When a customer replies to a previous response, betool recognizes the thread_id and restores the thread history in the agent's context. This is transparent to pipeline design.

Known limitations

No native MS Exchange EWS support yet (you can expose Exchange over IMAP).
No Microsoft Graph support for Office 365 (on the roadmap).
Parsing very old emails (nested Outlook 2003 RTF) may lose some formatting.