Inbound Improvements: Better Contacts JSON & New Date Fields

We have introduced some changes to the posted JSON object.

In a nutshell, here are the improvements:

• All contacts (From, To, Cc addresses) will contain both email and full name (display name). Before this change, we only extracted email address, but having the the full name will be a useful addition. Email and full name are separated into two JSON fields, so no additional parsing on your side is required.
  
• Emails with multiple recipients will be parsed on our side and passed with the JSON object as JSON arrays. Now you can easily traverse through all recipients, without any parsing.

• The Date property is added to JSON, holding the timestamp of the original message (presenting local time of the message sender). This can be useful to fetch local time zone of the people sending messages to your web app, among other things.

The specifics of these changes are included in the developer docs for handling contacts and send date.

Executing a non-breaking release #

To be respectful of your apps, we are going to keep all existing fields in posted JSON and only add new ones.

We added new fields with similar information to some of the existing fields, but they offer more information and have additional formatting.

For example:

"From": "myUser@theirDomain.com",
"FromFull": {
  "Email": "myUser@theirDomain.com",
  "Name": "John Doe"
},

This will cause some duplicate data to appear in posted JSON but will allow you some time to change over to using the new format.

We’re looking for specific use cases where the legacy format is useful. If your app includes one of those cases, please reply to this email and let us know.

Finally, many thanks to the developers who have quickly updated their code examples for Postmark Inbound in response to this update. If you’re interested in providing examples in other languages/frameworks, we can offer free credits in return for your contributions!

We’re really happy to be hearing from customers about how they’ve been using Inbound, so if you’ve got stories you haven’t told yet, please share them with us!