Webhooks for AI Beginners - Unlock Smarter Automation in 2025

What's going on, guys? Michael Elliot here. And today I'm going to be quickly showing you about custom mail hooks and custom web hooks as well as native webhooks. This is something that can be difficult for beginners to get their head around in terms of the use cases and the structure. I'll give you a bit of an understanding around exactly what it is. So if you want to be able to automate your processes more efficiently by pulling emails and by pulling form submissions, etcetera, Immediately, as soon as they happen, which your clients are going to want when you're selling them packages, this video is for you. Hop in. Because this is not as difficult as what it may feel or sound to a beginner or somebody who's, who's relatively new to the no code space. Okay, so we wanna. Yeah, you can't do that. Okay, I'll turn that on in a moment. What we want to do is if we take a look through it, we want to have, we want to add a custom mail hook which is under the web Hooks module. But I'm just going to show you why you wouldn't use Search Email Watch Emails trigger. Now, if you have a Watch Emails module, if you look at the trigger that's assigned to it, which is this little circle, which is this little circle here. If you look at the trigger, it's at regular intervals. Now you can choose once, once, once every day, every day. So days of the week, month, specific dates on demand. Like nobody's going to want a flow. In very, very, very small minute use cases. This may be effective, but, but what you want to do is you don't want to be wasting operations having this fire every 15 minutes to pick up an email, or every minute even, which is as low as you can go. You want to be using custom mail hooks so that every time you receive an inbox email, you receive an email to your inbox that fires the start of a scenario of whatever that may be. It might be that clients want invoices sent to. You know, clients might come to you and say, hey, we want invoices automatically sending to Slack and then a ClickUp task being created to, to. To fulfill payment, whatever. Like that's a basic flow. But you can understand why you would want that information immediately. The same as if you have a client who you. Let's say you're in a service industry like me. Like, I use this every day and it's when I receive an email, you know, if you've got a client that is extremely happy with services and is looking for another service. I get an automatic summary that's produced by ChatGPT as part of a flow using a mail hook that tells me exactly what the email is about. It tells me what actionables there are inside of it, and it gives me an overview of what I need to do next and what my prioritization should be. The power of mail hooks is incredible for businesses, and this is a skill set you're going to need if you're going to be able to build out those flows. So let's build the mail hook. Go inside of the web hooks module, or you can just search for mail hook, but I want to show you that they're all underneath the web hooks module. You hit custom mail hook and you'll notice the instant tag next to it obviously does what it says on the tin. It means it'll fire instantly. So we want to add a mail hook. So this button here, add a mail hook, give it a name. I'm going to call it Test Mail Hook. Michael. Test mail. Look, Mail hook. Test Mail Hook. Michael one save. This is our mail hook. This is a digital inbox. This is the email email address that we're going to import into Gmail in order to forward emails to this individual mail hook. That will fire this scenario and trigger it immediately. Okay, so we need to copy this. And then what we need to do is we need to head into Gmail. And when, once we're inside of Gmail, it's really, really simple structure. Go to the Settings tab, hit see all settings, and then head to forward in and pop slash imap. Once inside of there, you'll see lots of different pieces of information. All we care about is this forwarding section at the top. You used to have to make edits. You don't anymore. So we don't need to worry about anything else other than adding this forwarding address. So add the forwarding address and we're going to paste in the mail hook from make.com. once that's pasted in, hit next and then hit proceed. And this now tells us that a confirmation link has been sent to that said address. Okay, but because we're not forwarding to another inbox, it's not Michael at and being forwarded to accountants at that we have access to for the confirmation email. So we need to actually receive this email. Well, where is it currently? It's. It's in the sky. So we head back to make.com going to do it this way, just to keep my inbox clean, keep my desktop clean. So we head back into here, we hit save, okay? And what we're going to do is I'm going to save it, turn that on immediately as data arrives by ticking that box. And we're going to send a test email from the, from the, from the email address that we've just been setting up the forwarding from. It has a resend option. So you'll notice if you go back to the inbox that you were in under forwarding and imap, you'll see resend email. So if we hit resend email, you can see bottom left, confirmation email has been sent. And if we go back into the, into the make.com scenario, we'll see that. Let me just hit run once. Run the module once because it's not automatically firing. You see, I have done there exactly what you need to avoid. I'm going to leave this in the video because that is really important. I've built thousands of these and I've just tripped over on a, on a basic step. It's not yet forwarding the emails to that address because it's not verified. So it needs to be ran instantly. Okay, you'll see why in, in a couple of moments. So it's still running. If I, if I don't run out of time, I should be able to. To hit resend on this and it actually receive it. So we've hit resend and now we're going to go back inside of make.com and there you go, it fired. The reason that didn't fire the first time was because I hadn't hit run this module only on this individual mail hook. And the forwarding is not currently set up and in place. You'll see in a moment. But if you stick with this and you look at the information, this is the. You go to the inside of the. Inside of the bundle that we've got an output. The collection is tech as it has. It has different information inside of it that you could maybe pass and use later. But what we want to look at is this confirmation link. So we grab the confirmation link, we head, we paste it in and we click confirm. So the confirmation has been a success. That link is now set up and we have the green light in terms of forwarding. But what we don't have is inside of the. The individual Gmail. Is the final step completed? So come back into make, grab the mail hook that we've created and then go back to your, go back to your forwarding and you'll see this page is still here. Verify. So hit refresh and you'll notice the forwarding column has changed. Now the forwarding section of this, of this tab has changed. We want it's currently on disable forwarding. Hit forward of incoming mail to hit paste save changes. Now if we go to make.com if we go back to the make.com scenario. This is all now fully set up and working and the only thing we need to do to test it is to basically run the module and send an email over. You could head out and watch it work. But I've got a pre written email here to that email address. We're going to hit send and this will pick up the email. And once this picks up the email that means that our setup of our email forwarding is complete and we now know that we can trust this mail hook to pass the email emails that come through into here. Hey Michael, please can we book a call tomorrow 10am the mail hook is set up. It's receiving information. You can now go on and build the flow the understanding that all the emails are going to be put into here. Just a little sort of pro tip if you like. Let's say we had a chat GPT module here, okay. And let me just change it because it's not gonna let me unless I do Let me just save that. Choose a model. Let's just choose the mini. You hit save. You're killing me. Go through test save. You look at this now and I'm going to show you just a little cute little hack that you can do. It's the same with everything. You can use individual things. You can use routers if you have multiple scenarios, but you can set up a filter between one email to the next so from one module to the next in order to separate these emails. So you would say maybe if this scenario only wanted to like filter invoices and the senders. The sender's email address. You hit sender email address contains. So under text operators contains and you put I don't know, I mean let's say they came from accounts at. It's hard with invoices you have to work on the specific business, you know, or we could just have subjects contains, invoices, whatever. You can change the, the, the movement around, you know, invoice depending on the platform that they use. Find something that is, that is find something that is unique to that individual business and set the filters up. But what I'm just trying to show you is, is that now this flow will only run the web hook will the mail hook will catch the individual incoming inquiry but it will only pass over emails where the subject includes invoice. And that's the power of it. Later on you can use a router to go through and send different emails into different places if you want to. But I just thought I'd show you that here now whilst we're, whilst we're here because I think it's, it's important. Okay, so we're done with mail hooks. You now know how to set up a mail hook. You saw me make a beginner mistake during the middle of this video. I'm keeping it in. I want you to show you everybody does it, everybody's the same. If you're sleeping, especially when you're presenting can become a bit, a bit more hot under the collar. But you, you now know how to set up a custom mail hook inside of make.com to be able to fire off any email and you know how to filter them so that in its in and by itself is a massive opportunity for you to be able to sell the scenarios to business. This you're not gonna be able to sell pulling of the emails and filter in. But this is where the majority of flows start, at least in my experience. Depending on their tech stack and of course what you want to do. But the power of that should not be understated. Being able to pull from inboxes like that should. The power of it should not be understated. Okay, so now it's time for native and non native web hooks. Okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to type form. I'm going to use type form for this individual. I've just pulled up someone's type form. Let's go to type form. And inside of my workspace I'm going to create a new form, right? And I'm going to start from scratch and we're going to have it as a multiple choice question and we're going to add a choice and it's going to be A love it and B hate it. I'm going to change the design just because I can't stand looking at that. There we go. And so I've created now a form you can imagine you've got a business, their onboarding process is a client. A client agrees to proceed, signs a panda doc gets automatically sent an email using a make.com scenario that contains a form that's their onboarding form, HR client, you know, satisfaction of staff, whatever it might be. You can automatic that automatically gets fired out. And we want to listen for exactly when this is filled in. We want to make sure that we know that this is filled in. And as soon as it's completed, the correct action is taken. You can add that to a click up board. You could do anything like Monday.com whatever. But you can see how this would be beneficial to a business. That's a saleable workflow in and of itself. If you could handle a HR department's processes of staff satisfaction by. As soon as a form is submitted, they get alerted, but they also get a summary. And then maybe it's given a score. I've got a video on this. Maybe it's given a score that showcases to you whether, how, how poor that response was. And if the, and then senior management or the HR senior management can review and understand how they need to make changes inside the business for this individual users on this individual user's feedback, which they should be doing to keep their staff happy. So I've just gone top right and hit share slash publish. Okay, so that this form is now live and we have a link. Okay, so what we want to do is we want to go back inside of make.com and we're going to start with a native integration. So a native integration is when make.com actually already speaks to an app. It already allows you to be able to do this. And that's why I chose Typeform for this example. So if we look at the individual type 4 modules, you can see here that they've got an instant module that's called Watch Responses. This is effectively a web hook. It's a wet. It's a web hook, but it's native. It's already set up inside of make.com so you, you do this, we add. Let me just come back out of that. You go inside, you click add a hook, add a webhook. We're going to call this Michael's test form. My connection, the format, the form ID it. So it's going to ask for the, for the form id but you don't need to manually map that because. Is that the name of it? My new form, Michael's test form. Just to show you, because I've got two in there and I want to, I want you to be able to see it. So if we go back into here now click this drop down and hit refresh. Michael's test form pops up enabled. Check responses to the webhook immediately. Yes, save. The webhook is, is now the. Yeah, sorry, the web. The webhook is now set up. You hit save, we save the scenario. Let's just run, run this module. Let's go to this link, fill in the form. Love it. Submit. That form's been submitted. We've got a response. The answer inside of it is love it. So you can see the power of how that native integration would be crazy efficient. If you had a 15, 20 word onboarded document that you wanted to start, you know, fire a scenario off of you would use the the native webhook where available now some platforms and apps don't have native integrations and that is why custom custom webhooks exist. So in the next step here we're going to go through how we would customize this to set this up manually inside of type form without using their native integration and get the same result. Because then with apps that you use that aren't that don't have the native integration, I specifically picked it for that reason, you're going to be able to set them up. So we come back into here and delete, delete this and we want to add a custom web hook. This webhook wants to be called Michael's test type form, webhook Custom whatever and hit save. Don't worry about this API key authentication because Typeform doesn't require. Typeform doesn't require it specifically. This is how you would use custom web hooks though as well. Like a lot of, a lot of the common apps they you can sort of skirt around it. Some of them they require the API keys. You will go to said platform, get the API key and you know, go through the auto authentication process. You don't need to do that for type form. So I'm not going to. So we just hit save and this is our custom webhook. So, so we want to copy this address and we want to go back to our type form into Connect and then to webhooks. Go inside of there and you'll see this is the native webhook that we set up earlier. So this is the native one which we've got. So let's turn that off. Add a web hook paste in our URL. That is our, that is our custom webhook or just delete it. Mike, it's up to you. Hit save. I've got a command effort to find out which one it is. Turn it on the web hook that we just added. You can, we can delete that anyway. It's not necessary. So this webhook has now been added inside of, inside of Michael's test form. So if we go back to make.com hit save, run this module only Go back to Typeform. Not sure what the URL was. Grab this quickly. Answer the query. I still love it. Hit submit. Go back to mate.com you got exactly the same information, but we didn't use a custom, we didn't use a native integration. We use the custom integration. So from, from there that showcases you the power that showcases to you how you can get apps to speak to one another in every way. Mail hooks, native web hooks, app and custom web hooks Custom web hooks are things that are really important when you are creating flows because certain platforms don't integrate directly with make and that means that you're in a position that you're going to have to use the custom web hook side of things. But as you can see, especially using type form, it was extremely simple. Probably less explanation of how to create a custom webhook than it was to create a mail hook, for example, with the steps you go through. And a lot of people get flustered by the custom webhook structure. But it's a no code platform for a reason. If you understand what they are, if you understand that, you know, mail hooks are digital inboxes that you forward emails onto and you understand that custom webhooks get information from an individual platform immediately as it arrives. A URL databases all these things and when they're updated, it fires automatically, you're on your way to building custom flows for businesses. My name is Michael Elliot. I hope I've helped you understand this topic and I'll hit you in the next video. See you soon.