Integrating using Email

How can I use email to connect Appian with external systems?

Inbound

• Start processes via email
  • Using Process Model ID/UUID or Event ID
  • Using a dedicated mailbox and a routing alias (Self-managed Only)
• Send emails to active processes
  • Using Process ID or Event ID
  • Using a dedicated mailbox and a routing alias (Self-managed Only)
• Read emails using IMAP with the plug-in Mail Poller (Single Mailbox Only)
• Read emails from MS Exchange using the MSGraph API

Outbound

• Send E-Mail Smart Service
  • Configuring Custom Email Senders
  • Error Handling

Email Volume and Size Considerations

There isn’t a strict limitation to the volume of emails or their size imposed by the Appian platform separate from those in the underlying hardware or software. Your Appian instance’s ability to handle emails will vary greatly depending on individual use cases. It’s important to assess the specific use and role of emails on each of your applications to properly account for the necessary hardware and design configurations to ensure the proper functioning of your instance.

To gauge the load emails put on your instance, consider that the bulk of it lies on the processes and events it triggers. Thus, when sizing your instance to account for email load, focus on the amount of processes that will be started or interacted with via emails.

Besides following general Appian Best Practices, you should keep in mind these guidelines:

• Plan and execute appropriate performance tests with appropriate data size (e.g. text size in body, number and size of attachments) and volume (i.e. number of emails per period of time) representative of production levels.
  • Cloud Customers Only
    • You should inform the Cloud team of any performance problems with processing emails before promoting to production environments.
• Consider the disk utilization impact of attachments received via emails. All attachments, by default, are uploaded to a user-specified folder within Document Management. You may need to implement a process to routinely cleanup old/unnecessary attachments or discard them right away when initially processing the emails.
• Keep email body size as small as possible to avoid storing large unique strings in process variables as this can negatively impact execution engine memory utilization.
• Make email body content parsing as efficient as possible:
  • Use few nodes and loops.
  • Update process variables holding the email body sparsely.
  • Creating specialized custom functions is an acceptable alternative to overly complex process models built mainly for content parsing purposes.
• Self-managed Customers Only
  • Check with your IT department to ensure the network and email server infrastructure can accommodate the email load that’s expected by your instance.
  • Follow the Mail Server Setup instructions closely, paying particular attention to set passwords in the passwords.properties file. This will ensure passwords get encrypted and stored within Appian.