Email intake

Customers can start an order by emailing an order, an order form or a purchase order to one of the workspace’s intake addresses. OrderLoop checks the message, turns it into order input and starts the mailbox’s flow. Your OrderLoop administrator sets up the intake domain; the Email intake section of the Back office page lists the addresses.

Mailboxes

The local part of the recipient picks the flow. The defaults:

Address	Flow
orders@	tpl-b2b-order
po@	tpl-b2b-order
purchasing@	tpl-purchase-request

Your administrator can replace them with the workspace’s own mailbox mapping, from local part to flow id (for example wholesale@ → my-wholesale-flow). Matching ignores case and a +tag (orders+acme@ is orders@). The order’s model comes from the flow, its channel is email, and the flow’s latest published version runs.

Who may send

A message is accepted only when all of these hold. Otherwise it is rejected while it is being delivered, so the sender’s mail server returns a bounce with the reason:

Check	Rejection reason
The recipient is a configured mailbox	No mailbox <local>@ here
The raw message is at most 10 MiB	Message too large
The receiving server’s authentication result records dmarc=pass for the From domain, or dkim=pass or spf=pass for a domain aligned with it (the same domain, or one a subdomain of the other). Authentication headers that came with the message are ignored, and a pass for an unrelated domain doesn’t count	Message failed SPF, DKIM and DMARC
The sender is recognised (below)	Sender is not a known customer
The mailbox’s flow has a published version	Mailbox is not configured

A sender is recognised, in this order, by:

1. Customer address. The envelope sender equals a customer’s email; the order gets that customerId.
2. Company domain. The sender’s domain matches exactly one customer’s email domain, unless it is a webmail domain (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, Proton and similar), which never identifies a customer on its own.
3. Allowed senders. The workspace’s list of allowed senders (addresses or @domains, kept by your administrator). These senders start orders without a customerId; the AI extract node then matches the customer by name from the text.

To let a new customer order by email, add them as a customer with their email address; to accept a sender who isn’t a customer, ask your administrator to add them to the allowed senders.

What becomes the order

Order field	From the message
title	The subject, or Email from <sender>
customerId	The recognised customer, if any
documentText	From: and Subject: lines, the plain-text body (or the HTML body reduced to text), then each readable attachment under --- Attachment: <filename> ---; capped at 50,000 characters
meta	via: "email", from, to, subject, messageId, senderMatch (customer, domain or allowlist) and attachments (the filenames that were read)

lines start empty: the flow’s Extract order node reads them from documentText, as it does for an order whose input carries a document.

At most 10 attachments per message are read, each up to 5 MiB. Plain text, CSV, TSV, JSON and XML are read directly. PDF, Office documents, HTML and PNG, JPEG or WebP images are converted to text by Workers AI; an attachment whose conversion takes longer than 20 seconds is skipped. Anything else is ignored.

The original message is kept with the order’s documents, as kind email.

Redelivery

The message’s Message-ID is the order’s idempotency key (email:<Message-ID>). If the same message is delivered again, it maps to the same order, is logged as duplicate, and the sender gets no second acknowledgement. A different message that reuses a Message-ID is rejected with Message-ID reused for a different message.

If OrderLoop fails while starting the order (as opposed to a rejection above), the message gets a temporary failure and the sender’s mail server retries it later. The retry maps to the same order.

Acknowledgement

After starting the order, OrderLoop replies to the sender from the mailbox address with the order reference, unless the workspace has turned replies off. A reply can only go to a message that passed DMARC, so a failed reply never fails the intake.

The intake log

Every message is recorded as accepted, duplicate or rejected, along with the reason, the order and the number of attachments read. The Back office page shows the latest twenty under Email intake, next to the workspace’s mailbox addresses. Messages are kept for 180 days.