How do you set up the bills@ and expenses@ email inboxes?

Last updated: 5 November 2026

What are the two inboxes?

When the company workspace is created, InstantDrive records two addresses on your email domain. If your domain is company.ae they are [email protected] and [email protected]. They appear in the app under Dedicated Inboxes, with a copy button next to each.

How does an email reach the vault?

The path has four steps. Mail to your domain arrives at Cloudflare Email Routing. A small Cloudflare Worker forwards the raw message to the InstantDrive webhook with a shared secret. A background job then reads the message. Each attachment goes through the normal pipeline of reading, compression and naming, and the email is recorded in an inbound log with sender, subject and attachment count.

The company is found from the domain of the recipient address. If no workspace matches, the message is ignored in production and nothing is filed.

What must be set up on the mail side?

Creating the addresses inside InstantDrive does not by itself make your mail flow in. Mail for your domain has to be routed to the InstantDrive email worker. Whether InstantDrive configures this for you is not stated anywhere in the product, so do not assume it. Contact InstantDrive and ask for routing to be arranged for your domain.

Step 1: Write to [email protected] with your company domain and the two addresses you want to use.

Step 2: Ask what changes, if any, are needed at your domain registrar or mail provider. The settings tab shows an Inbound Domain Alias field and a note about pointing mail routing at the InstantDrive host, but the exact records depend on your setup.

Step 3: Wait for confirmation before telling suppliers to use the address.

How do you send a test?

Step 1: Open Dedicated Inboxes from the sidebar.

Step 2: Choose Send a test email to myself. InstantDrive creates a sample vendor message and files it. The result appears in the feed.

This button tests the filing step only. It does not send real mail through your domain, so it cannot show that routing works. It uses a placeholder attachment, so the fields read may be mostly empty.

Step 3: For a real check of the filing step, open the Interactive Inbound Simulator tab, choose the inbox type, enter a sender and subject and attach a real PDF.

Step 4: For a real check of routing, send an actual email with a PDF invoice from an outside address to bills@ on your domain, and watch the Live Inbound Audit Feed. The feed refreshes about every 15 seconds.

What arrives in the vault?

Each attachment becomes a document, read and named like any upload. Mail to bills@ is filed under Vendors. Mail to expenses@ is treated as an employee inbox, and its attachments are filed by the category the engine reads. The email body is kept in the inbound log, and the log links to the resulting document.

Open a log entry to see the sender, subject, attachments and the fields read. The sender is matched to a vendor or employee record by email address when one exists. You can approve a sender to bind their address to a vendor or employee record.

A fictional example

Desert Ledger Services LLC, a fictional company, gives [email protected] to its ten main suppliers. A supplier emails a tax invoice PDF. The invoice appears in the feed within minutes of routing being active, and the file lands in Vendors with the supplier name, TRN and total read from the PDF. The finance lead checks the fields in Edit Metadata.

How do you troubleshoot missing mail?

Work through these checks in order.

What do the inboxes not do?

They do not read mail already sitting in your own mailbox, and they do not need a login to send to. Anyone who knows the address can send to it, so share it only with the people who should use it. If you want to send the right team a notice, use Channels & Live Chat or Company Tasks.