Custom Email Format
If your backup software doesn't send emails in a format BackupMonitor already recognises, you can send a plain-text email in a simple custom format instead — no integration work required.
This is useful for script-based backups, home-grown tools, or any situation where configuring a supported backup product isn't practical. Simply send an email to your inbound address with the fields below and BackupMonitor will parse it automatically.
Email format
The email body should be plain text and contain the following lines.
Order does not matter, but each field must appear on its own line
with the label followed by a colon and the value. The body must also
include the signature line BackupMonitor Custom anywhere
in the text so BackupMonitor knows to apply this parser.
Device: My Server Job: My Job Status: OK Timestamp: 29.05.2026 05:00 Message: Backup completed successfully. BackupMonitor Custom
| Field | Description | |
|---|---|---|
Device |
required | Name of the machine or device that ran the backup. |
Job |
required | Name of the backup job. |
Status |
required |
Result of the job. Accepted values:
OK, Success or Erfolgreich
for a successful backup, Warning or
Warnung for a warning, and any other value (e.g.
Error, Failed, Fehler) for
an error. Values are not case-sensitive.
|
Timestamp |
required |
When the backup ran. Use the format
DD.MM.YYYY HH:MM, for example
29.05.2026 05:00. The time is interpreted in your
account timezone (set in Settings).
If the timestamp cannot be parsed, the email received time is
used as a fallback.
|
Message |
optional | A short description of the result, shown in the dashboard. |
The line BackupMonitor Custom must appear somewhere in
the email body. Without it, BackupMonitor will not recognise the
email as a custom backup report.
Sending the email
Send the email to your account's inbound address. You can find it in Settings → Inbound Email inside the app. The sender address determines which account and client the backup is attributed to, so use a consistent sender address across all your custom emails.
BackupMonitor also accepts the custom format as the text part of a multipart email — if the email has both a text and HTML part, the text part is used for parsing. HTML-only emails, as sent by many webmail clients, work too: the HTML is converted to text, one line per paragraph or line break, before the fields are read.