Email Inbox Parser: trigger review requests by forwarding an email

If your business runs on email rather than a booking system, this is the closest thing to an integration you can set up in an afternoon.

You forward — or simply BCC — an email to a special Cloutly address. Cloutly reads the message, works out who the customer is, and sends them a review request. No POS to connect, no API, no change to how you work beyond adding an address.

It is currently in beta.

What it does

When an email arrives at your Cloutly address, it reads the message body and any attachments to extract the customer's name, email address and phone number. It then creates or updates that contact and starts whichever review campaign you have chosen.

So if you email a customer their invoice and BCC your Cloutly address, the details are pulled out of the invoice itself — you do not have to type anything or format the email in any particular way.

It also works forwarding from a CRM: if your system emails you when a job is completed, forward those and each one becomes a review request.

What you need first

This depends on sending review requests from your own domain, because the address you forward to lives on that domain. Set that up first.

Use a dedicated subdomain — reviews.yourcompany.com — not the domain your team already uses for email. This matters more here than anywhere else, and the next section explains why.

Why it has to be a subdomain

For Cloutly to receive your forwarded emails, Cloutly has to be the only mail server for that domain. That is what the MX record does.

Mail delivery follows MX records, and a lower priority number wins. Higher numbers are backups, used only when the first server does not respond at all.

If you add Cloutly's record to a domain that already has Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace on it:

Cloutly on a higher number — your provider answers first, finds no such mailbox, and rejects the message. It does not then try Cloutly, because a backup is only used when the first server is unreachable, not when it answers and says no. Nothing arrives and the feature does nothing.
Cloutly on the same number or lower — Cloutly starts receiving mail meant for your staff, and anything that is not a forwarded customer email is discarded. The sender sees a successful delivery, so nobody finds out.

There is no priority number that works on a domain carrying company email. A separate subdomain has no other mail server on it, so Cloutly receives what you forward and your real email is never involved.

Setting it up

Set up reviews.yourcompany.com as your sending domain under Settings → Notifications — see Send review requests from your own email domain
Add the MX record shown on that screen, priority 10, on that subdomain
Click Verify and wait for the inbound row to confirm
Go to Integrations and open Email Inbox Parser
Choose the campaign that should run when an email arrives

Then send one test email to yourself and BCC your Cloutly address. If a contact appears in Cloutly within a minute or two, it is working.

If nothing arrives

Almost always the MX record. The integration can look connected while no mail is reaching it, because connecting and receiving are separate things.

Check your subdomain's MX records in your DNS provider, or with any public "MX lookup" tool:

Is the MX on the subdomain you set up, rather than your main domain?
Is Cloutly's the only MX record on it? If anything else is listed, mail may be going there instead.

If you added the record to your main domain by mistake, remove it. Sending review requests is handled by the other two records and keeps working without it.

Replies come here too

Once this is set up, replies your customers send to a review request also land in your Inbox rather than disappearing, and someone replying to ask a question becomes a lead you can follow up.