Setting Up Your Skimmr Custom Email Inbox

Press releases, agency wires, newsletters — your newsroom receives critical content by email every day. The Custom Email Inbox brings that content into Skimmr automatically, so it appears in your feeds alongside everything your team already monitors.

What is the Custom Email Inbox?

Skimmr generates a dedicated email address for your account. Any email sent or forwarded to that address is ingested, analysed, and surfaced in your feeds — processed through the same pipeline as web-scraped content.

This directly addresses how most newsrooms actually operate:

• Content arrives too late — A press release lands in your inbox before it appears online. Skimmr gets it into your feeds the moment it arrives, not when the crawler eventually finds it.

• Content lands in the wrong place — Important emails scatter across individual inboxes, so coverage depends on whoever happens to see it first.

• Routing is manual — Editors spend time forwarding emails to the right colleagues or desks. With Skimmr, content reaches the right feed automatically.

• Some content never goes online — Not every press release or wire item gets published. If it arrives by email, Skimmr can still capture it.

Before You Begin

Step 1 — Find Your Inbox Address

1. Go to Settings → Email Ingestion.

2. Your inbox address is displayed in the Email address field. Use the copy icon next to the field to copy it.

3. Under Pause email processing, you'll see the current status. When the inbox is running, the button reads Currently active. Click Pause to stop processing incoming emails. Skimmr will reject all emails while paused.

Share your inbox address with editors, PR contacts, and the agencies whose content you want to track.

Step 2 — Configure Whitelisting

In the Whitelisting section, choose how Skimmr handles incoming senders:

Option A — Accept only emails from defined email addresses (recommended)

Skimmr accepts emails only from the addresses or domains you specify — enter up to 500 entries, one per line. To approve an entire domain, use a wildcard: *@mediacompany.com accepts any address at that domain.

Skimmr pre-fills this field with your own company domain as a starting point. You can add, edit, or remove entries at any time.

Emails from addresses not on your list are silently discarded. The sender receives no reply or notification.

Option B — Accept from all

Anyone who knows your inbox address can send to it. Skimmr warns this may result in spam, so Option A is recommended for most newsrooms.

Start with your own domain so internal forwards work, then add the agencies and wire services your team relies on.

Step 3 — Start Sending Emails to Skimmr

There are two ways to get emails into your inbox:

Option A — Forward individually

Forward emails from your regular email client to your @inbox.skimmr.app address as needed. Useful for getting started or for one-off items.

Option B — Set up automatic forwarding

Configure a forwarding rule in your email client or on your mail server so that emails matching specific criteria — sender, subject keywords, mailing list — are automatically routed to your @inbox.skimmr.app address. This is the most effective way to run the inbox at scale. Talk to your IT admin about setting up server-level forwarding rules.

What Skimmr Extracts

Every email that reaches your inbox is processed through Skimmr's full content analysis pipeline: topic extraction, location tagging, and relevance scoring. The extracted content is then matched against your feed filters, exactly as crawled content is.

Skimmr extracts the subject line, body text, and text content from the following attachment types — up to 10,000 characters per file:

• PDF (.pdf)

• HTML (.html)

• Plain text (.txt)

Where an email contains more than three supported attachments, Skimmr processes the three smallest files first. Other file types are ignored, but the email body and subject are still processed.

Limits and Edge Cases

How Emails Appear in Your Feeds

Email content appears in your feeds alongside everything else Skimmr finds — no separate feed or view required. If an email matches the topic, location, or relevance filters of an existing feed, it will appear there automatically.

Your inbox content is fully account-specific. Other Skimmr customers cannot see it, and it will never appear in their feeds.

Deduplication: When the Same Story Arrives More Than Once

It is common for content to reach your newsroom by email before Skimmr's crawler finds the same story on the web. Skimmr handles this automatically so your feeds stay clean.

URL-based matching: When an email contains a link to the source article or press release, Skimmr matches it against crawled content by URL and removes the duplicate.

Similarity-based matching: When there is no direct URL match, Skimmr uses semantic similarity to identify near-duplicate stories and surfaces only one version in your feeds.

Frequently Asked Questions