I recently set up paperless-ngx and wanted an easy way to simply email myself receipts or documents and get them uploaded and tagged.

paperless-ngx is a super cool way to host docs. I wanted originally to just organize and digitize my receipts and taxes in a way that will stay backed up and easy to find.

Then I realized I want to simplify it because that process can take a long time manually.

First: I set up mailgun for my tld, lets say mail.foo.com Mailgun has a free tier thats more than enough for my low volume use-case, and they allow you to forward messages after filters to a webhook.

I created a route that checks that I sent it and forwards it to something I deployed (will go over that futher below) behind a tailscale funnel (so that it can be exposed to the wider net).

Next I wrote a super minimal flask app called mailgun-to-paperless-ngx that will take the attachments from mailgun and upload them to paperless-ngx using the To as tags. Example: receipt+work@mail.foo.com with an attachment dinner.jpg will upload it to paperless as dinner (title) and tags receipt and work.

Lets see it by sending this image out to testing@mail.foo.com.

We see mailgun posted it.

We also now see that the flask app is processing and uploading it:

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file saved to /tmp/dinner.jpg
Uploading dinner.jpg to http://paperless-ngx.paperless-ngx.svc.cluster.local:8000 with tags [20]
Upload complete. Task ID: d8148db1-19a2-4392-8e3b-17f16fc905ef
Checking on task d8148db1-19a2-4392-8e3b-17f16fc905ef ...
waiting for task d8148db1-19a2-4392-8e3b-17f16fc905ef to complete...
Checking on task d8148db1-19a2-4392-8e3b-17f16fc905ef ...
task d8148db1-19a2-4392-8e3b-17f16fc905ef completed successfully

And now it’s in paperless as expected