Get your email in Telegram: why you might, and how

Email is a good archive and a bad notification system. Telegram is the reverse: great at pings, mediocre at long-term storage. Most people use both — one for work correspondence, one for real-time stuff. The gap most alias services don't address is the awkward middle: one-off verification codes, delivery notifications, newsletter signal, service emails. These need to hit you fast, don't need to live forever, and drowning your real inbox with them is friction you can avoid.

The Telegram delivery use case

Concrete examples where Telegram-first makes sense:

• Verification codes that expire in 10 minutes. Banking MFA, VPN signup, 2FA fallback. The email is a transport artefact; you don't want to archive it.
• Newsletters you want to read on the move. Headlines in a chat scroll cleaner than in Gmail.
• Transactional alerts from hobby projects. Your Raspberry Pi telemetry, your Uptime Kuma notifications, your NAS smart-alerts.
• Dead-drop signups. You want to know if something arrives; you don't care about the full message unless you ask.

The thing that's clunky about the status quo is Telegram bots don't receive email directly. You'd have to write a webhook, handle an SMTP ingest, poll IMAP — every solution needs glue. Alias services that ship Telegram delivery as a first-class feature (we're one of the few) remove that glue.

How emailforward.xyz delivers to Telegram

There are two pairing modes:

1. Per-inbox pairing (recommended). In /manage-email, you request a link for your real inbox. From there you click "Add chat", pick DM / group / channel, and pair once. Any alias that forwards to that inbox also delivers to every paired chat — no per-alias setup.
2. Per-alias pairing. When creating or managing an alias, add a Telegram recipient directly. You get a short /verify CODE to send to the bot (or a deep link for DMs). Only that alias delivers to that chat.

Group and channel pairing works the same way — you add @emailforwardxyz_bot to the group, send /link CODE (inbox pairing) or /verify CODE (single alias), done. Mail fans out to every paired chat.

What you lose

Telegram delivery is not a silver bullet. Know the trade-offs:

• Attachments > 50 MB are skipped. That's a Telegram Bot API limit, not ours. The email itself still forwards by mail if you also have an email recipient.
• HTML fidelity is sacrificed. We strip most styling; you get the text body plus the raw HTML as a file attachment.
• Telegram's privacy model applies. Your forwarded content transits Telegram's servers. If your threat model excludes that, stick to email-only forwarding.
• Bots can't read replies in groups without being made admin. Forwarded content flows one way: into Telegram, never back out.

When to use which

• Single real inbox, want everything in Telegram too → inbox pairing. One-time setup, covers all future aliases.
• Sensitive alias (banking, 2FA) that you want isolated → per-alias pairing with a dedicated DM.
• Team-shared signup (ops alerts, CI failures) → pair the team group via /link CODE.

Start from /telegram for the full walkthrough, or just create an alias and add a Telegram recipient from the setup screen.