JAMS Incident Management can watch a mailbox over IMAP and fire a flow whenever a matching email lands. It's the right trigger when the system you care about already emails you — a monitoring tool, a backup job, a vendor's status notifications, a shared support inbox — and you want those emails turned into calls, SMS, push, or Teams pages with retries and escalation.
Plan availability: Email (IMAP) monitoring works on every plan, including Free. The alert channels it can trigger are plan-dependent (Voice starts on Starter; email, push, Teams and Slack are on every plan). See Plans & Billing.
If you can already POST to a webhook, prefer that — it's faster and cleaner (see Getting started). Reach for email monitoring when the source can only email you.
How it works at a glance
- You give JAMS Incident Management read access to a mailbox (an email connection).
- A flow watches that mailbox on an interval and matches incoming mail against your criteria.
- A match fires the flow's recipients and escalation policy, exactly like any other trigger.
- JAMS Incident Management deduplicates by message ID so the same email never pages twice.
Create the connection before, or during, the flow — your choice
There are two ways to set up the mailbox JAMS Incident Management reads from. They produce the same thing — a reusable, saved email connection — so pick based on how you work.
Option A — Create it ahead of time at Email Connections.
Build the connection as a standalone object first, then select it when you build flows. This is the better choice when several flows will monitor the same mailbox (for example, one flow for CRITICAL subjects and another for WARNING subjects on the same support inbox). One connection feeds many flows — you enter the credentials once.
Heads up: the Email Connections page is admin-only. If you don't see it, you don't have the admin role on this tenant.
Option B — Create it inline while building the flow.
In the flow builder, on the email-trigger step, click ➕ Create New next to the connection picker. Fill in the same details, test, and save. The connection is saved and auto-selected for this flow — and it's available to pick from the dropdown in every future flow, just like one created in Option A.
Inline creation is available to anyone who can build flows, not just admins. So if you don't have access to the admin-only Email Connections page, you can still create the connection you need from inside the flow builder.
Which to use: if you'll monitor one mailbox from multiple flows, create a reusable connection up front (Option A) so the credentials live in one place. For a one-off flow, inline (Option B) is quicker — and the result is still reusable later.
Set up the connection
Whichever path you take, the fields are the same.
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Connection Name | A label you'll recognize later, e.g. Support Inbox Monitor. |
| Email Provider | Microsoft 365 / Outlook, Google / Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Other (Custom). |
| Email Address | The mailbox to read. |
| App Password | The mailbox password — but see the app-password note below. |
| IMAP Host / Port | Auto-filled for the known providers (993 is the standard secure IMAP port). For Other (Custom), enter your server's host and port. |
App passwords (read this for Gmail, Yahoo, and MFA-protected Microsoft 365)
If the mailbox has multi-factor authentication / 2-step verification enabled, your normal password will not work over IMAP. You need an app password instead — a separate, single-purpose password your provider generates for older protocols like IMAP.
- Gmail: an app password is required — Google does not allow IMAP with your normal password.
- Yahoo: required when 2FA is on.
- Microsoft 365 / Outlook: required when MFA is on.
- Custom: use an app password if your provider has MFA/2FA enabled.
Generate the app password in your email provider's security settings and paste that into the App Password field — not your account login password.
Test before you save
Click 🔌 Test Connection (the 🔍 Test Connection button in the inline flow-builder version). JAMS Incident Management opens a real IMAP session with the credentials you entered and reports success or the exact failure.
Why this matters: the Save button stays disabled until a test succeeds. A green test is the difference between "the flow is armed" and "the flow silently never sees a single email." Always get the green check before moving on.
If the test fails, the most common cause is using the account password instead of an app password — see above.
Per-flow search criteria
The connection only grants access to the mailbox. Each flow then layers its own matching rules on top, so different flows can react to different mail from the same inbox:
- From Address (optional) — restrict to a specific sender. Leave it empty to match mail from anyone.
- Search String / Keyword — the text that must appear for the flow to fire (e.g.
ERROR,CRITICAL,Failed). This is matched against the email subject line only — JAMS Incident Management deliberately does not open message bodies, so it never marks your unread mail as read. - Check Interval — how often the mailbox is polled, from every minute up to hourly. Every 5 minutes is the recommended default; tighten it for time-critical alerts.
Because the keyword matches the subject, make sure the sending system puts the signal you care about in the subject. If it only appears in the body, ask the source to include it in the subject or switch that source to a webhook.
Deduplication — the same email never pages twice
Every email carries a unique Message-ID. JAMS Incident Management records the Message-ID of each email it acts on and skips any email it has already processed. So if a flow polls every minute and the matching email sits in the inbox for an hour, it fires once, not sixty times. (For the rare email that arrives with no Message-ID, JAMS Incident Management synthesizes a stable fingerprint from the message so dedup still holds.)
You don't configure this — it's always on.
After the trigger fires
Once an email matches, the flow behaves like any other: it pages your recipients on their chosen channels and escalates if nobody acknowledges. Set who gets paged, in what order, and how long each step waits in your escalation policy.
Troubleshooting quick hits
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Test Connection fails | Using the account password instead of an app password | Generate an app password in your provider's security settings and use that. |
| Test fails for a custom server | Wrong host/port, or IMAP not enabled on the mailbox | Confirm the IMAP host/port with your mail admin; ensure IMAP access is turned on. |
| Flow never fires on a real email | Keyword isn't in the subject line | The match is subject-only. Make sure the signal appears in the subject. |
| Email arrived but no page | A different flow already acted on that Message-ID, or the flow is inactive | Dedup is per Message-ID across the tenant; confirm the flow is active. |
| Can't find the Email Connections page | It's admin-only | Create the connection inline in the flow builder instead, or ask an admin. |