Email Feeds

Integrations > Data Import > Importers > Email Feed Accounts

Warning: As of the Winter 2025 release, the ability to set up Email feeds is deprecated. Customers that had Email feeds prior to Winter 2025 may continue to use those feeds, and they will also still be able to set up new ones. If you require the use of Email feeds, submit a Feature activation request so that Medallia teams can validate the use of this now-deprecated feature.

Email Feed Accounts import data from email messages sent to Medallia Experience Cloud's email servers. The feed data may be in the body of the message, in one or more attachments, or a combination of both. After the importer successfully updates the database, the feed can optionally trigger an Exporter to send data to an external system.

Feed flow: external system to Medallia via email, then to Email Feed and Auto Importer wth optional flow to exporter back to external

Note: Email is the least secure import method available. Consider using an SFTP Feed instead.
Restriction: This feature is not available on Medallia GovCloud. For more information, contact your Medallia representative.

Email Feed Accounts topics:

Creating an email feed

The first time you create an email feed:

  1. Define the properties and set Processing mode to Active.
  2. Click Save.
  3. Wait a few minutes (5 maybe) to permit the system to adjust and accept the Incoming email configuration settings.
  4. Modify the specification and change the Processing mode to Upload with pretend processing.

You can now test the configuration. If emails sent to Medallia "bounce", make the mode Active, wait longer, and then return to Pretend mode.

When the system processes the email, you can see the results in the Feed Files reports.

Properties

Unique Name

Name of this feed. It is good practice to include the company name in the name, and it is best practice for the name to reflect the E-mail matching string settings. For example, a name like "orion-invitations" identifies the company and the purpose of the feed.

Description
The description of this feed; should include the purpose and information about the expected source system and Auto Importer specification.
Processing mode

Processing state of this feed.

  • Active — Incoming files are processed and records are added to the Experience Cloud.
  • Inactive — Incoming files are not processed.
  • Upload with pretend processing — The feed is active, but records are not added to the database. Use this to test the feed.

After Active or Pretend jobs, the processing report shows the statistics of the event

Importer traffic

Reports statistics about recent active and pretend processing activities for this feed, including successful and failed feeds over time. All times are based on the current time when the page displays — for example, "Past Day" is 24 hours before the page displayed, not everything in the previous day. This can be different from other reports that show activity from the previous day, which would be all traffic that day.

This information appears only after the feed has processed files.

Lifetime of Feed Files
Count of days to retain imported files and processing reports. After this many calendar days, the files are purged from the data centers. Default is to use the Import Deletion Schedule setting on the Company settings screen. See the description of that field for considerations about choosing a value. To be compliant with the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this value should be 30 days or less.

This setting does NOT affect files retained on company-hosted or Medallia-hosted FTP/SFTP hosts.

Important: To comply with GDPR policies, files are deleted after 30 days.

Incoming email configuration

These settings define how to identify and process the email messages.

Important: Each data center has a unique email domain. See Medallia Experience Cloud IP addresses and host names for the names in each data center..
E-mail matching string

Process received emails whose  "To" name matches this string. This is the portion of the name before the '@' symbol. For example, orion-feed matches emails sent to 'orion-feed@express.medallia.com'.

The string must be alpha-numeric, and may include hyphens (-) and underscores (_). 

To process multiple addresses, separate the names with a bar (|), like this: orion-feed|rigel-feed.

Match .<anything>
Matches any "To" name where the matching string is followed by a period (.) and then by any text before the '@' symbol. For example, use this to match "orion-feed.2233@express.medallia.com".
Warning: If this option is checked, all emails must have a period (.) followed by extra characters after the matching string, or they will be rejected. This feature is not an additional matching condition; it completely replaces the matching conditions: you cannot both accept the original matching string by itself and accept a matching string followed by a period (.) followed by extra characters at the same time.
From e-mail validation regex

Only accept emails where the From address matches the regex. Use this to reject all mail not from the approved systems. For example, use this expression to accept emails from orion.com and from rigel.com:

.*@(orion|rigel).com
Feed File location

Where to look for the feed file in the email.

  • Attachments — (default) Each attachment to the email message is treated as a feed file.
  • HTML body + optional attachments — The HTML in the message body is feed data, in addition to each attachment (if any).
  • Text body + optional attachments — The plain text in the message body is feed data, in addition to each attachment (if any).

Note that you might need to create one or more Auto Importer Preprocessors to process the data before sending them to the Auto Importer.

File regex
Process only those attachments whose name matches this expression. Leave empty to process all attachments.

Record processor

Choose only one processor: either Auto Importer or Lego.
Auto Importer processor
The Auto Importer specification that processes the incoming data.
Lego processor
Lego processor to process the retrieved file.
(Legacy) Convert format

(Deprecated) Convert format to process the retrieved file.

Warning: After setting up a new feed account with LEGO/ConvertFormat processor, test it using Kind UPLOAD_WITH_PRETEND_PROCESSING. Check the processing report carefully to make sure that the feed data is getting processed as expected. This is particularly important with stay files or survey import files (that is, anything that generates or creates new records in Experience Cloud): deleting survey records on a production server is extremely tedious and/or involves scarce engineering resources. But in general, this is a good practice for testing feed accounts that process all kind of data.

Processing options

Primary UnitGroup

(Auto Importer only) Sets the From address of the report e-mails. When this property is set, the Auto-Importer does not determine the survey permission and or do duplicate checking.

(Lego only) Only accept records with Unit IDs in the selected Unit groups. Records for Units not in this Unit group scope are rejected. Applies only to LegoProcessType of SURVEY_IMPORT and SURVEY_UPDATE. It does not work for other process types such as STAY_IMPORT, EMAIL_IMPORT, or OPTOUT_IMPORT.

Extract archive
Extracts records from an archive (such as a zip file) when the content is a compressed file. This option is on by default, and this option is only available when first creating the Feed. After saving the specification the first time, this option is no longer available. In practice, there is no reason to turn this off.

Email report

Summarized report e-mails
Only for Auto Importers. Email addresses (comma-separated) to receive the summarized processing report of successes and failures.
Lego e-mail template
Only for Lego. E-mail template to use for the processing report.
Copy of processing report to sender
Sends the processing report to the sender of the incoming e-mail (in addition to the Summarized report e-mails recipients).
Processing report from e-mail validation regex
When Copy of processing report to sender is on, only email addresses matching this regex receive the email reports.

Post-processing options

Post-processing actions are optional activities to happen after the Auto Importer successfully updates the database. These do not happen when the importer fails to update the database, such as when a record is invalid or when a file is processed with Upload with pretend processing.

Trigger an export after file is processed
Turn on trigger export processing after successfully importing the data. After turning this on and saving the specification, the Trigger section will be available to define the trigger.

Trigger

Trigger options define when and what to trigger as part of the post-processing actions. This section appears after turning on Trigger an export after file is processed, and saving the configuration.

Export to trigger
Exporter to trigger.
Trigger pre-conditions

Files that must have been successfully imported and processed before the export will trigger.

  • The first line is a filename or filename regex identifying a file successfully processed by this feed in the recent past (length varies by system load).
  • (Optional) Each of the following lines begin with an integer indicating a number of hours, followed by a comma, and then a filename or filename regex.
    • Each specified file must have been successfully processed within the number of hours specified.
    • If any of the files was not processed in the specified time, the export is not triggered.
    • These optional files can be processed by any Auto Importer, for any account in the company.

In the following example, each of these conditions must met for the export to trigger:

  • The feed successfully processed a file matching the regex invitation_file.*.csv.
  • In the past 1 hour some importer successfully processed a file matching the regex org_update.*.csv.
  • In the past 3 hours some importer successfully processed a file matching the regex account_update.*.csv.
invitation_file.*.csv
1,org_update.*.csv
3,account_update.*.csv

Remember, the Feed Files reports show the processing status of imported files.

Last trigger attempt
Timestamp of the last time a trigger successfully processed a feed.
Trigger another Feed Pull
(available for Feed Pull importers only) Another Feed Pull to trigger when this one finishes. Use this option to ensure sequential processing of import files.
Preview triggers
Lists exports that have been triggered per the pre-conditions, but which have not yet run. The list appears at the bottom of the screen when

Testing

Upload a test .eml (email) file
Manually select an email flle (.eml) to upload and process, as if the email had be received by the Medallia server. Useful for testing.
Tip: Small files upload quickly. However, large files may take awhile: on the order of several minutes. Very large files have been known to take up to 20 minutes to process before they appear in the Feed Files list and before email notifications are sent.

Restrictions

The email message must include the filename in the the Content-Disposition MIME header. For example:

--Message-Boundary-by-Mail-Sender-1234567890
Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="some-input-file.xls.pgp"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="some-input-file.xls.pgp"