SendGrid Inbound Parse

I’ve spent most of a weekend trying to figure out how to get attachments from SendGrid’s Inbound Parse service. If you haven’t heard of it – it accepts an incoming email, parses out the various parts and sends them to you by posting to a web form you have set up for this.

The “text” parts of the message (from, to, subject, etc.) were pretty straightforward, but trying to figure out how to get files that had been attached to the message took me a long time to figure out. (Much longer than it should have, in hindsight.)

I followed the recommendations of the tutorial video and configured Inbound Parse to send the information to RequestBin, a service that will accept and show you posted form values without your having to write any code.

The values that I sent to RequestBin agreed with the documentation. There was an “attachments” value that would tell how many attachments were included and “attachmentX” value(s) for each attachment. (If attachments = 2, there would be an attachment1 value and an attachment2 value.)

I reconfigured SendGrid to post the values to an Azure website I have. The code that I wrote based on the SendGrid documentation (and what I saw on RequestBin) kept throwing exceptions, so I took advantage of Azure’s remote debugging feature (which is awesome, by the way).

The attachment-related values weren’t showing up. SendGrid has posted 13 form values to RequestBin, but I was consistently only getting 9 in my ASP.Net application. For 2 days, I assumed that something was going on with ASP.Net, thinking that it was related to request validation, or something like that.

After hours of fighting with this, I finally realized that when I had re-configured SendGrid to post to my Azure site instead of RequestBin, I had checked the “SendRaw” checkbox. The explanation next to the checkbox says “This will post the full mime message”. What it doesn’t tell you is – it changes what SendGrid posts.

If you check the SendRaw checkbox – you won’t get these form values:

  • attachments
  • attachment-info
  • attachmentX
  • text
  • html

Instead you will get an “email” value that has the original email message.

Since the whole point of using the Inbound Parse is to not have to parse the email, I’d recommend not checking the SendRaw checkbox.