Renewly Inbox

Renewly Inbox gives you an email address that belongs only to your account. Forward a renewal notice, an invoice or a contract PDF to it, and Renewly reads it. New contracts wait in the review queue. A matching contract can be updated if it has not been reviewed yet. Reviewed contracts stay unchanged. It saves you downloading and uploading files by hand.

Your two addresses

Renewly calls these addresses aliases. You start with two. Both use the same short name, called a handle, which is based on the first part of your account email.

Inbox. Your handle on its own. Forward vendor emails here from your normal mailbox: renewal reminders, invoices, price-increase warnings and signed contracts.
Ghost Inbox. Your handle with -stack added (for example acme-stack). Use it as the email address when you sign up for a new software tool. The welcome email, invoices and renewal reminders then go straight to Renewly.

Always copy an address from Settings › Inbox. Do not type one from memory. That page shows every address in full, and the part after the @ has changed before.

To set up your addresses for the first time:

Go to Settings › Inbox.
Click Provision my aliases.
Copy the Inbox address and save it as a contact in your email program.

You can add more addresses on the same page, for example one per vendor, so you never hand out your main one. Type a handle, pick a type, and click Create alias. A handle must be 3 to 32 characters long and use only lowercase letters, numbers and dashes. It cannot start or end with a dash.

How many you can have: the Free plan includes 2 addresses. Paid plans include up to 25. The settings page shows how many you have used.

Revoking an address: click Revoke next to it. From then on, mail sent to it is thrown away, and the sender gets no bounce message. A revoked address can never be used again, even by you, so choose handles you plan to keep.

How it works

An email arrives at one of your addresses.
Renewly checks that the email really came through its email provider and works out which account the address belongs to.
If the email has a PDF attached, Renewly reads the first PDF just as if you had uploaded it yourself. The file can be up to 15 MB.
If there is no PDF, Renewly reads the email itself and picks out the vendor name, the amount, the currency, the renewal date, the notice period, the length of the term and whether it renews automatically.
If Renewly finds a matching contract with that vendor, it can update the details only if the contract has not been reviewed yet. Reviewed contracts stay unchanged. If there is no match, it creates a new contract.
A new contract goes into the review queue. Check its details and approve it before it appears in your contract list.

A new contract counts towards your monthly contract-reading allowance, just like an upload. Updating a contract you already have does not. If your allowance has run out, the email is not processed and it shows as Rejected.

Every email Renewly receives is listed on the Inbox page, with its status and a View contract link when a contract was made from it. You can filter the list by All, Extracted, Failed, Rejected or Processing.

Renewly stores each forwarded email, and any contract made from it, in your account’s own data region (Europe or the United States).

Emails that are not from vendors

Not every email is about a contract. If an email without a PDF has no words like renewal, subscription, invoice, billing, payment or price increase, Renewly does not try to read it. It stays out of your contract list and shows on the Inbox page as Rejected. Click Dismiss on it if you want it gone from the count.

What works well

Contract PDFs sent as attachments.
Renewal reminder emails with a clear date and amount.
Auto-renewal warnings (“your subscription renews on...”).
Invoice or receipt emails that show a total and a currency.
Welcome emails from new tools that mention your subscription or trial (use the Ghost Inbox for these).

What does not work so well (yet)

Long marketing emails where the contract details are buried.
Receipts with no total on them.

Renewly keeps a record of every email it could not read. On the Inbox page, choose Failed or Rejected to see them and decide whether any should have worked. You can always upload the contract yourself instead.

Security and limits

Renewly only accepts an email once it has confirmed that the email provider really sent it. Anything else is refused without being read.

If an address has previously bounced Renewly’s emails or marked them as spam, Renewly does not process mail from it. Those emails show as Rejected.

Hourly limit: to stop anyone flooding your inbox, Renewly accepts up to 60 emails an hour across all your addresses. Emails sent from your own Renewly login address, or from a colleague’s in the same workspace, can go on arriving up to 200 an hour. Anything over the limit is not processed and shows as Hourly limit reached, so you can see it and forward it again later.

Mail sent to an address that does not exist, or to one you have revoked, is thrown away without a bounce. This is on purpose, so that nobody can test which addresses are real. If a forwarded email never shows up, check Settings › Inbox first. Each address there shows when it last received an email.