Advertising Channel with Scheduled CSVs through Mail

Mail CSV is the lowest-friction way to bring data into Clarisights when your advertising platform or vendor already emails CSV reports on a schedule. You create a channel with the Mail source, Clarisights gives you a unique inbound email address for it, and every report emailed to that address is imported when it arrives.

At a glance

Connector type Email-based file ingestion

Authentication Unique email address per channel (no credentials)

File formats CSV attachments; also gzip (.csv.gz) or ZIP (one CSV per archive) compressed CSVs, and Excel (.xlsx, .xls)

Refresh cadence Each email is imported when it arrives

Limited rollout No

Authentication options

Mail CSV uses an email address as the auth boundary. Each Mail channel gets its own unique inbound email address: reports sent to that address are imported into that channel only. There are no API keys, OAuth flows, or passwords to manage.

Keep the inbound email address private. Treat it like a credential and only share it with the person or system that should be sending reports.
If the address is ever exposed, contact support to have it replaced.

Setting up the connection

Step 1: Create a channel with the Mail source

Click the Integrations icon (the database stack) in the left navigation bar. Under "Set up new connection", find POD (for any data) or Custom Advertising (for ad-channel data) and click + Connect. Enter a Name and an Abbreviation, choose Mail as the Source Type, and save the channel. See Creating a POD data source for the full form.

Step 2: Copy your unique inbound email address

Open the channel from "Manage connected channels" on the Integrations page. The channel shows Mail: Send email to followed by its inbound address. Every report emailed to this address lands in this channel only.

Step 3: Configure the report to be emailed to that address

In your advertising platform's reporting UI (or in your vendor's scheduler), set up a recurring CSV export and add the Clarisights inbound address as the recipient.

⚠ Common error: Report not imported → the report is going to the wrong address. Reports are matched to a channel by the exact recipient address, so copy it from the channel page, including the part after the + signs.

Step 4: Map the columns

After the first email has arrived, map the report's columns to dimensions and metrics for the channel (your CSM can help with this). From then on, every report is imported as soon as it is received, and new rows appear in the channel's reports after the import completes.

⚠ Common error: Schema mismatch → the CSV's header row doesn't match the columns the channel expects. Make sure the report layout in your vendor's UI hasn't changed and that no columns were added, removed, or renamed.

Connection details exchange

You provide to Clarisights

Clarisights provides to you

A recurring report sent to the channel's inbound address

A unique inbound email address for each Mail channel, shown on the channel page

What we read

Attachments only. Clarisights reads only the attached files. The subject line and email body are ignored, so it's safe for the sender to include any commentary or formatting in the message.
First row as header. The first row of every CSV is treated as the column header. Data rows start from row two.
Compressed and Excel attachments. A gzip file or a ZIP archive containing a single CSV is decompressed and read as CSV. Excel files are converted to CSV on receipt.

Connector specifics

Attachment size. Standard email attachment limits apply: roughly 25 MB per email across all attachments. If your reports are consistently larger than this, an SFTP, S3, or warehouse connector is a better fit.
Multiple attachments per email. Each attachment is imported separately into the same channel, so all of them must use the same column layout.

Limitations & known constraints

Per-email attachment cap of roughly 25 MB. For larger volumes, use SFTP, S3, or a warehouse connector instead.
Inline CSVs (data pasted into the email body) and download links in the email body are not supported; the report must be a file attachment.
Password-protected ZIP files are not supported. HTML email reports and PDFs are not ingested.
A ZIP archive must contain a single CSV file.

Operating notes

Imports follow your vendor's send schedule: each email is processed when it arrives. To change how often data updates, change the schedule in your vendor's tool.
To re-import a period, ask your vendor to resend the report for those dates.
If your vendor changes the report layout, the column mapping in Clarisights needs to be updated to match. Send a sample of the new CSV to your CSM before the upstream change goes live.

Need help?

When contacting support from the in-app messenger, please include:

The channel name and abbreviation (Integrations → Channel)
The exact error message or screenshot
The time the report was sent and the sender address
When the issue started