Inbound Email Capture

Your legal team negotiates over email, but those conversations live outside the contract record. When a colleague picks up a negotiation, they have to piece together context from forwarded threads and inbox searches. Critical emails get buried, and attachments get lost.

Pactly’s email-in feature solves this by giving every contract a dedicated email address. CC that address on any email, and the message appears on the contract timeline automatically, visible to everyone with access to the contract.

Every contract in Pactly has a dedicated email address in the format:

{companykey}-{type}-{reference}@emailin.pactly.ai

For example: [email protected]

The address components are:

• Company key - a short identifier for your organization (set by your admin)
• Type - t for template contracts, p for playbook contracts, e for external contracts
• Reference - the contract’s unique reference number

You can find this address in the Metadata section of the contract detail page. Click it to copy to your clipboard.

To capture an email on the contract timeline:

1. CC the contract’s email-in address on any outgoing email, or
2. Forward an existing email to the contract’s email-in address

The email appears as a timeline event within a few minutes, showing the sender, subject, body, and any attachments. Everyone with access to the contract can see the captured email.

If Pactly cannot match the email to a contract (for example, if the address is mistyped), it sends a failure notification back to the sender explaining that the email could not be associated.

When an inbound email is captured, Pactly can flag the contract as Action Required for the contract owner. This makes it easy to spot contracts that need attention after receiving new correspondence. Administrators can enable this behavior in Account > Action Required Settings.

When someone emails the contract’s email-in address, the email itself is always captured on the timeline. Attachments, however, are handled separately and follow specific rules.

Attachment extraction is off by default. When disabled, email attachments are visible as part of the email event on the timeline, but they are not saved as separate supporting documents on the contract.

To enable it, an administrator must go to Account > Email (under the Settings tab) and check “Extract attachments from email-in emails and add as supporting documents for the contract.” Once enabled, qualifying attachments from inbound emails are automatically saved as supporting documents.

With extraction enabled, attachments are saved as supporting documents on the contract when they meet all of the following criteria:

• The file is not an image (not image/png, image/jpg, image/gif, etc.)
• The file is not the contract’s own Pactly-generated document

In practice, this means document attachments like PDFs, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and other non-image files from third parties are automatically captured.

There are three situations where attachments are silently skipped:

1. Images are excluded

Any attachment with an image content type (image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, etc.) is filtered out. Most image attachments in emails are signature logos, social media icons, or inline decorative images, not meaningful documents. Filtering them prevents the contract’s supporting documents from filling up with irrelevant files.

2. The contract’s own document is skipped

If someone emails back a Pactly-generated document for that same contract (for example, by replying with the draft attached), Pactly detects it and skips it. This works because Pactly embeds metadata (the contract ID and type) inside every .docx document it generates. When an attachment contains those properties matching the current contract, it is recognized as a duplicate and excluded.

This is the most common source of confusion. A user forwards the contract document back to the email-in address expecting it to be logged as a new version, but it is intentionally excluded to avoid duplication.

3. Attachment extraction is disabled

If the company-level setting is not enabled (the default), all attachments are silently skipped regardless of file type. The email itself is still captured on the timeline, but no supporting documents are created.

• CC the email-in address on every external email about a contract. This builds a complete conversation trail on the timeline without requiring you to forward emails after the fact.
• Enable attachment extraction if your team receives documents by email. Side letters, compliance certificates, and supporting schedules are automatically saved as supporting documents, so nothing gets lost in an inbox.
• Use Rounds for revised contract documents, not email-in. When a counterparty returns a marked-up draft, upload it as a new Round to get version comparison. The email-in attachment filter will skip Pactly-generated documents anyway.
• Check the Metadata section for the email-in address. Each contract has a unique address. You can click it to copy to your clipboard.

• Contract Timeline - How timeline events work, including email events
• Send Messages to External Parties - Sending tracked emails from within a contract
• Track Contract Progress - Negotiation rounds and document comparison