How to add email automation to Ignition (MES/SCADA)
Short answer
Ignition sends email through its notification and SMTP profiles but does not read inboxes. To process inbound email, run a mailbox reader outside the Gateway that parses messages and writes rows or calls a Web Dev endpoint, with review for anything that changes MES records.
Ignition is strong at outbound email: alarm notifications, scheduled Reporting module PDFs and scripted messages through an SMTP profile. What it does not do is read your mailbox. Yet in many plants the MES-adjacent work arrives by email: work orders and schedules from the ERP team, customer change notices, supplier ship notices, calibration certificates and maintenance requests from the floor.
Those emails end up retyped into Ignition screens or into the ERP. The manual step creates the usual errors: wrong work order, missing revision, delayed action. Automating it is attractive, but Ignition is a control and MES platform, so the automation has to be careful about what it is allowed to write and who reviews it.
The outbound side deserves a second look too. Teams often send raw alarm text by email. A better design builds a message with context from the historian and MES tables, deduplicates bursts into a digest, and routes by role, which cuts the noise that causes people to filter alarm emails into a folder they never read.
What teams use it for
Maintenance request by email
An email to a maintenance mailbox is parsed for asset, symptom and urgency, then creates a request row linked to the asset's recent alarms.
Schedule or work order notices into MES
A planner's email with work order, quantity and due date is extracted into a staging table that a supervisor confirms before the order appears on the line screen.
Customer change notices
A revision change email is matched to open orders and flags affected jobs in Perspective so operators see a banner before running the wrong revision.
Calibration and certificate intake
Vendor calibration emails with attachments update the gauge or instrument register and notify quality when due dates move.
Smart outbound digests
Alarm bursts are collapsed into one message per area per interval with counts, top sources and trend links.
Scheduled reports with commentary
A shift report PDF from the Reporting module is sent with a generated summary of what changed since the last shift.
Inductive Automation Ignition (MES/SCADA) integration surface
- Alarm notification profiles with an Email notification type over SMTP, and system.net.sendEmail in Gateway and client scripting for custom messages.
- Reporting module scheduled reports that email PDFs, plus scripting to attach generated files.
- Web Dev module doPost endpoints that an external mail processor can call with parsed content, or direct SQL inserts into staging tables.
- Named Queries and Transaction Groups for validated writes into MES, work order and maintenance tables.
- Gateway scripting for scheduled jobs, but no native IMAP or POP inbox reading, so inbound mail needs an external component or custom Java library.
How it works
- 1
Scope the mailboxes
Use dedicated shared mailboxes, such as maintenance or planning, not personal inboxes. Define which message types you will automate and which stay manual.
- 2
Run the reader outside the Gateway
A small service connects over Microsoft Graph or IMAP, fetches new messages and attachments, and marks them processed. Keeping it external avoids blocking Gateway threads.
- 3
Extract fields
Use rules for structured emails and a local language model for free text. Return structured fields with a confidence score and the source excerpt.
- 4
Validate against Ignition data
Check asset IDs, work order numbers and part revisions against SQL tables through a Named Query before anything is accepted.
- 5
Stage, then confirm
Write into a staging table. Low-confidence or high-impact items appear on a Perspective review screen; simple known patterns can auto-accept.
- 6
Reply and log
Send an acknowledgement through the SMTP profile that includes the created record ID, and store the original message reference for audit.
Example flows
Email to maintenance request
Trigger: An operator emails the maintenance mailbox about a leaking hydraulic line on a press.
- The reader fetches the message and sends the text to an extraction step.
- The asset is matched against the asset table and the symptom is classified.
- A staging row is created with the last 24 hours of alarms for that asset attached as context.
- A planner confirms on a Perspective screen and the request becomes a work order.
Result: A structured request with alarm context exists in minutes, without retyping.
Revision change notice
Trigger: A customer's engineering contact emails a revised drawing note for a part.
- The reader detects the part number and revision in the message and attachments.
- It queries open work orders for that part.
- A flag record is written against each affected order.
- Perspective shows a banner on those orders and notifies the supervisor.
Result: Operators see the change before starting the next batch.
Keeping data on-prem
Inbound email processing is easy to keep on-site: the mail server can be Exchange on-prem, or a cloud mailbox read through Graph with the extraction step running locally. Run the extraction model on a local GPU with an open-weight model so customer and supplier content never reaches a public AI service. Keep the reader and staging tables on the plant network and give the reader only the SQL permissions it needs on staging tables. If the Gateway cannot reach the mail server directly, the reader can sit in a DMZ and push to a queue the Gateway or a SQL job consumes.
Security checklist
- Treat email content and attachments as untrusted: strip macros, scan attachments and never execute embedded content.
- Defend against prompt injection in email text by never giving the extractor write access, only structured output.
- Allowlist sender domains for auto-accept patterns; send everything else to review.
- Use a service account limited to staging tables, not the main Gateway database account.
- Keep a link from every created record to the original message ID and extraction output.
Ways to get it done
Rules-based mail parser with SQL staging tables
Effort: One to three weeks.
Predictable, structured emails from a few senders.
Dedicated mailbox reader with local LLM extraction and Perspective review screen
Effort: Four to eight weeks.
Free-text maintenance, change and supplier mail with mixed formats.
Partner delivery with ERP linkage across Ignition and the business system
Effort: Scoped per site; Netray can work with your integrator and ERP partner.
Plants where the same email must update MES and ERP records consistently.
Pitfalls
- !Polling a mailbox from a Gateway script can hang threads on network faults; keep the reader external.
- !Auto-writing straight into live MES tables skips review and one bad parse can start the wrong job.
- !Alarm email via Exchange throttling or SMTP relay limits can silently delay critical messages during a flood.
- !Threads and forwards create duplicates; deduplicate on message ID and a content hash.
Frequently asked questions
Can Ignition read incoming emails?
Not natively. Ignition sends email through SMTP profiles and scripting, but it has no inbox reader. You add an external service that fetches mail over IMAP or Microsoft Graph, extracts data, and writes to SQL or a Web Dev endpoint for Ignition to consume.
Should email create work orders automatically?
Only for narrow, well-understood patterns. Most plants start with a staging table and a Perspective review screen, then auto-accept the patterns that prove reliable. Anything touching production orders or quality status should keep a human confirmation.
How do I reduce alarm email noise?
Use pipeline delay and grouping, send digests per area, add escalation only when no one acknowledges, and put priority in the subject. Fewer, richer messages are read; a stream of single-alarm emails is filtered out.
Can this run with a local AI model?
Yes. The extraction and classification step can run on an on-prem GPU using an open-weight model, so supplier and customer emails stay inside the plant. The model returns structured fields and never writes to Ignition directly.
What about attachments like PDFs?
Attachments go through a separate document capture step, covered in the document OCR approach, and the result links back to the email record. Do not parse large attachments inside Gateway scripts.
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