IMAP connector

Turn your shared mailboxes into queryable data.

Data Panda pulls every message from info@, support@ and orders@ over IMAP into your warehouse alongside the rest of your business data. From one place, we turn it into dashboards, automations, AI workflows and custom apps your team uses every day.

IMAP
 Data Panda Reporting Automation AI Apps
IMAP
About IMAP

The lowest common denominator of email integration.

IMAP is the Internet Message Access Protocol, defined in RFC 3501 in 2003 and updated as IMAP4rev2 in RFC 9051 in 2021. It lets a client read mail from a server while the messages stay on the server, in folders, with flags for read, unread, flagged and answered. Cleartext IMAP runs on port 143, IMAPS over TLS on port 993. It is the read-side counterpart of SMTP, and the alternative to POP3, which downloads and usually deletes.

Most business email tools without a vendor-specific API speak IMAP: shared inboxes like info@, support@ and orders@, legacy mailboxes on a hosting provider, contractor or freelancer mail on consumer-grade providers, audit-archive feeds. The mailbox itself is full of business: who wrote in, when, about what, who answered, how fast, what got missed.

The point of pulling IMAP into a warehouse is not to replace your inbox. It is to make the mail auditable and queryable: response time per sender, lead source attribution per campaign, sender frequency per domain, threads that nobody picked up, mails that arrived after hours and waited for Monday morning.

What your IMAP data is for

What you get once IMAP is connected.

Inbox reporting

See who writes in, who answers, and which threads sit too long without a reply.

  • Messages received per mailbox per day, with sender domain
  • Median and worst-case response time per inbox
  • Open threads older than X hours per assignee

Mail-driven automation

Turn incoming mail into the next step in sales, support and operations.

  • Create a HubSpot lead when a new sender writes to info@
  • Open a ticket when a support@ thread crosses the SLA
  • Forward orders@ attachments straight to the ERP queue

AI workflows

Use mail content to summarise, classify and prioritise without reading every thread.

  • Classify support@ mail by topic and urgency on arrival
  • Summarise long threads before a handover
  • Detect repeat complaints from the same domain across mailboxes

Custom apps on your data

Tools your sales and support team open to chase a stale thread without scrolling Outlook.

  • Shared-inbox dashboard with traffic-light response time
  • Search across every mailbox by sender, domain or keyword
  • Lead-source attribution from info@ replies into the CRM
Use cases

Use cases we deliver with IMAP data.

A list of concrete reports, automations and AI features we have built on IMAP data. Pick the one that matches your situation.

Response-time SLAMedian and p95 reply time per shared inbox, per week.
Sender frequencyTop domains writing to info@ ranked by message count.
Lead-source attributionWhich campaigns push senders into info@ versus support@.
Stale threadsOpen threads older than X hours, per assignee.
After-hours mailVolume that arrived outside business hours, per inbox.
First-touch reply rateShare of inbound mail answered within the first hour.
Mailbox loadMessages received per mailbox per day, trended over time.
Repeat sendersDomains that wrote in more than three times this month.
Attachment throughputFiles delivered through orders@ per partner per week.
Bounce and spam loadShare of inbound flagged as spam or auto-bounce.
Out-of-office detectionSenders on vacation, parsed from auto-replies, per week.
Mailbox audit trailEvery message ever received, with sender, subject and folder.
Real business questions

Answers you will finally get.

How fast does support@ answer customers?

Median and p95 reply time per inbox per week, with the slowest threads listed by name. The team lead sees the SLA reality on Monday morning, not at the quarterly review when the customer has already left.

Where do leads in info@ come from?

Sender domains and referrer text from info@ messages, joined to the CRM. Marketing sees which campaigns push real conversations into the inbox, not just clicks on a landing page.

Which threads have been sitting open too long?

Threads in shared inboxes without a reply for more than X hours, ranked worst first, with the assigned mailbox. The morning standup gets a list instead of a feeling.

Value for everyone in the organisation

Where each function gets value.

For finance leaders

Finance sees orders@ throughput against booked sales, with attachments routed into the AP queue and a record of which supplier mail arrived after cut-off. The audit trail of every received invoice mail sits next to the booking, not in someone's archive.

For sales leaders

Account managers see which prospects wrote into info@ this week and how fast someone replied. The CRM picks up sender domain and first-touch latency, so the lead-source debate has data behind it.

For operations

Support and operations get response-time SLA per shared inbox, plus the list of threads sitting too long. The vague feeling that support@ is overloaded turns into a number per week per assignee.

Ideas

What you can automate with IMAP.

Pair with HubSpot

Create HubSpot leads from info@

Each new sender domain that writes into info@ becomes a HubSpot contact, with the original subject and body attached as a note. Marketing sees which campaigns trigger inbound conversations, not just form fills.

Pair with Salesforce

Surface inbox SLA inside Salesforce

For account managers on Salesforce, each customer record shows the days since the last reply on the support@ thread and the count of open mails for that account. The customer call about the slow response turns into a heads-up the AM gives the customer first.

Pair with Intercom

Open Intercom conversations from support@

Inbound mail to support@ becomes a conversation in Intercom, threaded by sender, with the response-time clock running from the moment the mail arrived in IMAP. The team handles old-school mail and chat in the same queue, with the same SLA.

Pair with Slack

Post stale or after-hours mail to Slack

When a thread in a shared inbox crosses the SLA, or a mail arrives outside business hours, a focused Slack message goes to the right channel with sender, subject and a link to open it. The team picks up what would have waited until Monday morning.

Pair with monday.com

Open Monday tickets from orders@

Each new mail to orders@ with an attachment becomes a card on the order-intake board in monday.com, with sender, subject and the attached file name. Recurring senders cluster on the board, so the team sees the partner pattern, not just today's mail.

Pair with Exact Online

Route supplier invoices from mailbox to Exact

PDF invoices arriving on a dedicated mailbox over IMAP are extracted, parsed and matched against open purchase orders in Exact Online. AP sees which mails landed today, which already have a booking proposal, and which need a manual review.

Your existing tools

Your data lands in a warehouse. Your BI tools read from it.

You keep the reporting tool you already have. We connect it to the warehouse where your IMAP data lives.

Power BI logo
Power BI Microsoft
Microsoft Fabric logo
Fabric Microsoft
Snowflake logo
Snowflake Data warehouse
Google BigQuery logo
BigQuery Google
Tableau logo
Tableau Visualisation
Microsoft Excel logo
Excel Sheets & pivots
Three steps

From IMAP to answers in three steps.

01

Connect securely

OAuth authentication. Read-only by default. We sign a DPA and your admin keeps the keys.

02

Land in your warehouse

Data flows into your warehouse on your schedule. Near real time or nightly, your call. You own the data.

03

Reporting, automation, AI

We build the first dashboard, workflow or AI feature with you, then hand over the keys. Or we stay on for ongoing delivery.

Two ways to work with us

Pick the track that fits how you work.

Track 01

Self-serve

We set up the foundation. Your team builds on top.

  • IMAP connector configured and running
  • Warehouse set up in your cloud account
  • Clean access for your Power BI, Fabric or Tableau team
  • Documentation on what's in the data model
  • Sync monitoring so you're warned before reports break

Best fit Teams that already have a BI analyst or data engineer and want to own the build.

Track 02

Done for you

We build the whole thing, end to end.

  • Everything in Self-serve
  • Dashboards built to the questions your team actually asks
  • Automations between your systems
  • AI workflows scoped to real tasks your team runs
  • Custom apps where a dashboard does not cut it
  • Ongoing delivery at a pace that fits your team

Best fit Teams without in-house BI or dev capacity. You tell us what you need and we deliver it.

Before you book

Frequently asked questions.

Who owns the data?

You do. It lands in your warehouse, on your cloud account. We don't resell or aggregate it. If you stop working with us, the warehouse stays yours and keeps running.

How fresh is the data?

Near real time for most operational systems. For heavier sources we schedule hourly or nightly. You pick based on what the reports need.

Do I need a warehouse already?

No. If you don't have one, we help you pick one and set it up as part of the first delivery. Common starting points are Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, or a small Postgres start.

How is IMAP different from POP3?

POP3 downloads mail and usually deletes it from the server. IMAP reads mail in place: messages stay on the server, in folders, with flags for read, unread and flagged. For shared inboxes you almost always want IMAP, because more than one client and the warehouse all need to see the same state.

Do you connect over TLS?

Yes. IMAPS over TLS on port 993 is the default. Cleartext IMAP on port 143 is supported when an old internal server requires it, but we flag it during setup. Credentials live in a secrets store, not in the pipeline definition.

When should we use IMAP versus the Microsoft 365 or Gmail API?

If your mailbox lives on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and you have admin access, the vendor API is usually the better connector for richer metadata and OAuth. IMAP is the right choice when there is no API: legacy hosts, contractor mailboxes, audit-archive feeds, or vendors who only expose IMAP.

GDPR-compliant
Data stays in the EU
You own the warehouse

A first deliverable live in four to six weeks.

We review your IMAP setup and the systems around it. Together we pick the first thing worth building.

Book a call See our other connectors