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Everything you need to know about using Renewly

Renewly Inbox

Renewly Inbox lets you forward (or have vendors send directly to) a dedicated address that belongs only to your account. The ingestion pipeline extracts contract terms (vendor, renewal date, total value, notice window, term length, auto-renewal flag) and either updates an existing contract or creates a new one.

Your two aliases

Each Inbox-enabled account gets two addresses. They share the same handle but serve different jobs:

  • Inbox alias. <you>@<inbox domain>. Use this for forwarding renewal notices, invoices, and any vendor email that arrives at your real mailbox.
  • Ghost Inbox alias. <you>-stack@<inbox domain>. Use this when signing up for new SaaS tools so the welcome email, first invoice, and renewal reminders all flow into Renewly directly.

Always copy the address from Settings › Inbox rather than typing one from memory - that page shows each address in full, and the inbox domain has changed before. From there you can also create vendor-specific aliases and revoke ones you no longer need. Revoked addresses cannot be reused, so pick handles you intend to keep.

Quota: Free accounts can hold 2 active aliases (the default Inbox and Ghost Inbox you provision on first run). Pro accounts go up to 25, which leaves room for vendor-specific handles like aws or contracts-legal. The settings page shows your tier and remaining alias count next to the create form.

How it works

  1. An email lands at one of your aliases.
  2. Renewly verifies the message and looks up which user the alias belongs to.
  3. The body is passed to our contract extractor, which pulls out vendor name, total value, currency, renewal date, notice window, term length, and auto-renewal status.
  4. If we already have a contract from the same vendor, we update it. Otherwise a new contract record is created with the extracted data.
  5. The new or updated contract appears in your standard contract list, where you can review and edit it like any other contract.

Every message we receive shows up in your Inbox with a processing status badge and a link to the resulting contract. Use it to audit which forwarded emails landed and which ones we could not extract.

Non-vendor mail

Not every email is a vendor email. We only run extraction on messages that look vendor-related (renewal, subscription, invoice, billing, etc.). Anything else is dropped quietly so your contract list stays clean.

What extracts well

  • Renewal reminder emails with a clear date and amount.
  • Auto-renewal warnings (“your subscription renews on...”).
  • Invoice or receipt emails with subtotal and currency.
  • Welcome / onboarding emails from new SaaS tools (Ghost Inbox path).

What doesn’t extract cleanly (yet)

  • Long marketing emails buried under unrelated content.
  • Receipts that lack any explicit total.
  • Multi-language emails (English only at launch).

Messages we receive but cannot extract cleanly are still recorded server-side. Use the Inbox list, filtered to Failed or Rejected, to review them and confirm which ones should have parsed.

Security

Inbound mail is delivered over TLS via our email provider’s authenticated MX path. The webhook that hands it to Renewly is gated two ways: a rotating shared secret embedded in the URL, and a cryptographic signature over every delivery, which we verify before the message is read. An unsigned or stale request is rejected outright. Suppression rules apply too: if you have unsubscribed a sender from Renewly notifications, we won’t accept inbound mail from them either.

Mail sent to an address that does not belong to an active alias is discarded without a bounce - deliberately, so nobody can probe which addresses exist. That is also why a revoked address goes quiet rather than erroring: check Settings › Inbox first if a forwarded email never arrives. Each address there shows when it last received anything.