Email to Work Item

Each project can have its own inbound address. Forward a customer mail, an alert or a request to it and Lithora captures it as a work item in that project — no copy and paste.

Email to Work Parser

inbound

Received

Re: URGENT — checkout 500s on retry

From dana@acme.com
To project-8f2a91c4@lithora.io

Seeing failures since 14:00. Needs a fix by Friday. #billing

Captured

URGENT — checkout 500s on retry

To DoHigh#billing

The Re: prefix is stripped, the urgency wording raises the priority, and a hashtag in the body becomes a tag.

Creating a forwarding address

Go to Settings → Email Parser (the page is titled “Email to Work Parser”).
Click New Rule.
Pick the Target Container — the project the mail should land in. You can only choose projects you have access to.
Set the Default Status (To Do, In Progress or Done) and Default Priority (Low, Medium or High).
Leave Auto-assign work to email sender on if you want mail from people who already have a Lithora account to be assigned to them.
Add any Default Tags that should go on every item this address creates.
Click Create Rule. Lithora generates an address of the form project-8f2a91c4@lithora.io. Copy it with the copy button next to “Forward emails to”.

Where to put the address

Anywhere a machine or a person already sends mail: a forwarding filter in your mail client, a distribution list, an alerting webhook that sends email, or simply as a contact your team forwards to by hand.

How a message becomes a work item

Part of the email	Becomes
Subject	The title, with a leading `RE:`, `FW:` or `Fwd:` removed and a 200-character cap.
Body	The description. The plain-text part is preferred and the HTML part is used if there is no plain-text one. Everything from a standard signature delimiter or a “Sent from…” line onwards is dropped.
Urgency wording	Priority. “urgent”, “asap”, “important” or “critical” anywhere in the subject or body sets High; “low priority”, “when possible” or “sometime” sets Low; otherwise the rule default applies.
Deadline wording	A due date, when the body contains a phrase like “due Friday”, “deadline: March 3” or “by March 3”.
Hashtags in the body	Tags — `#billing` becomes the tag `billing`, added alongside the rule default tags.
Sender address	Recorded on the item as its origin, and used to assign it when the sender has a Lithora account and auto-assign is on.

The captured item is a normal work item from that point on: it lands in the project board and backlog, appears on the timeline once it has a due date, and can be assigned, commented on and linked to a pull request like any other.

Triggering automations from inbound mail

Every captured message also emits an email.received event carrying the new work item, the sender, the subject and the project. Use it in Automations to route the item — notify a channel, apply a label, assign an owner or escalate on a keyword.

Managing rules

One address per rule

Each rule owns exactly one address and one destination project. Create several if different inboxes should land in different projects.

Counters

Each rule shows its own received count, and the page totals Active Rules, Emails Received and Work Captured.

Deleting a rule

Deactivates its address. Mail sent there afterwards is ignored — silently, from the sender's point of view. Work items already captured are unaffected.

Edge cases that generate tickets

The address must be a real recipient.Lithora matches the forwarding address against the message's To and Delivered-To recipients. Putting it in the body, or only in Bcc from a system that strips it, means no match — and no match means the message is quietly dropped, not bounced.
Duplicates are suppressed. Mail providers retry deliveries. Lithora keys each delivery on the message id, so a retried message does not create a second work item.
Attachments are not imported. The text of the message becomes the description; files attached to the mail do not become work-item attachments. Upload anything you need to keep.
Replying to the work item does not reply to the sender. Capture is one-way. Comments in Lithora stay in Lithora.
Auto-assign needs a matching account. The sender address has to match a Lithora user exactly. Mail from an outside customer stays unassigned, which is usually what you want.
A long thread makes a long description. Forwarding a 40-message thread captures the forwarded text as one description. Forward the specific message that describes the work, and the item stays readable.

Inbound mail is authenticated

Lithora accepts inbound messages only through its signed inbound-mail webhook, and rejects anything unsigned or incorrectly signed. Someone who learns your forwarding address cannot forge a delivery to it from outside the mail path.

Plans

Email capture is available on Pro and Scale. Captured items count towards the same limits as any other work item on your plan; see Billing & Plans.