Table of contents
What are email triggers?
Some of the most important things you'll ever want on a screen start life as an email: a maintenance alert from a supplier, a "we won the deal" note from a colleague, a menu change from the kitchen, a safety notice from head office. Normally that means someone screenshots it, opens the CMS, builds a slide, and publishes — every single time. Email triggers remove that whole loop. You create one trigger, Fugo gives it its own inbound email address, and from then on anyone you allow can put content on screen simply by sending an email — no CMS login, no design step, no waiting on the signage team. It turns your screens into something the whole organisation can update through the one tool everybody already knows how to use.
Triggers let your Fugo screens react automatically instead of only following a fixed schedule. When a trigger fires, it plays its content on the screens you chose, then those screens return to their normal rotation on their own. An email trigger is a trigger whose firing rule is simply "an email arrived at my address" — optionally narrowed to specific senders, subjects, or body text. Fugo can display that email as it arrives, or use AI to reformat it into a clean signage layout first.
Like every trigger, an email trigger is really just a playlist with a firing rule attached — so it uses the same permissions, content picker, and screen-picking flow as playlists elsewhere in Fugo. You're not learning a second system, just a new way to decide when a playlist plays.
What you'll need
A Fugo account with playlist permissions
Triggers use the same permissions as playlists — create, edit, and publish — rather than a separate "trigger" permission. If you can already build and publish playlists, you have everything you need to build and run email triggers too.
At least one connected screen
Your trigger needs a destination screen to play on. If you don't have hardware yet, you can still build and test triggers using the Fugo Chrome extension player or the Fugo browser player, both of which let you preview playback directly from your browser.
An email account to send from
Unlike our CRM triggers, email triggers need no connection or OAuth step — Fugo mints a dedicated inbound address for you automatically. All you need on the sending side is any email account (yours or a colleague's) that's allowed to send to that address.
💡 Don't have a Fugo account yet? Start a 14-day free trial at www.fugo.ai/app.
Create your email trigger
Email triggers are built in the trigger builder, a full-screen wizard with four steps in a fixed order: Trigger, Content, Screens, and Preview. A footer bar moves you between steps, and the top-right buttons let you Save a draft at any time or Save and Publish to go live. You can rename the trigger inline at the top — it starts out as "New Trigger."
To start: go to Triggers in the left-hand navigation, then click New Trigger.
Choose Email as your trigger type
The Trigger step shows every available trigger source as a card, grouped under headings like Connected & available. Click the Email card — its description reads "React to inbound email." Because email needs no external account, it always shows a green Connected status.
💡 The Email card only appears when creating a trigger. A trigger's inbound address is minted once, on creation, so you can't convert an existing trigger of another type into an email trigger — start a new one instead.
Set your email filters
Selecting the Email card opens the Email Configuration panel. Before you've saved, it explains what's about to happen: "A unique inbound email address is created for this trigger when you save it. Anything sent to that address drives this trigger — choose how it's reformatted into content on the Content step."
Three optional filters let you control which emails count. Leave them all empty and any email to the address fires the trigger; add any of them and an email must satisfy all of them to fire:
Allowed senders (optional) — a comma-separated list of email addresses or bare domains, e.g.
alice@company.com, company.com. Leave empty to accept any sender. If you type something that isn't a valid email or domain, you'll see "Not a valid email or domain:" followed by the offending entries.Subject contains (optional) — the email's subject line must contain this text, e.g.
[signage].Body contains (optional) — the email's body must contain this text, e.g.
announcement.
Click Save in the panel to keep your filters (or Cancel to discard them), then Next to move on to content.
💡 Filters like Subject contains are the best way to let people reuse one email account for both normal mail and signage — only emails with your agreed keyword in the subject reach the screen.
Choose how the email becomes content
On the Content step, the content-source selector includes an Inbound email source (for email triggers it's selected for you automatically). This opens the email reformat settings, where you decide how an incoming email is turned into what plays on screen:
Transform prompt (optional) — a plain-language instruction for reshaping the email into signage, e.g. "Extract the headline and key dates, format as a bold announcement for a lobby screen." Leave it empty to display the email as received; add a prompt and Fugo uses AI to reformat each incoming email before display.
Duration (seconds) — how long the content stays on screen when it plays. Defaults to 20 seconds.
Click Apply to save these settings (the button reads Update prompt once a prompt has been applied, with a Remove option to clear it).
Behind the scenes this adds a single automatic placeholder item to the playlist. You don't fill it in yourself — the first time a matching email arrives, Fugo overwrites that placeholder in place with the email's content (reformatted if you set a prompt). That's why one trigger can keep showing the latest email without you ever editing it again.
Choose your screens
On the Screens step, choose where this content plays. You can target screens two ways: By Screen (pick individual screens or groups directly) or By Property (set a condition on a screen property, so any matching screen — including ones you add later — is targeted automatically). Switching between the two modes clears the other's selection, so decide which fits before filling it in.
Save, publish, and get your address
You can save a draft at any point. Going live requires Save and Publish, which stays disabled until the trigger has its source and criteria configured, content chosen, and at least one screen assigned — the tooltip reminds you: "Add content, assign a screen, and configure the trigger to publish." The Preview step lets you review the trigger, its content, and its screens together before you commit.
The first time you save a new email trigger, Fugo mints its inbound address and shows the Email trigger created dialog: "Send emails to this address to update this trigger," followed by the address itself in a copyable Trigger address field (of the form trig-xxxx@in.fugo.ai). Copy it, share it with whoever should be able to post to the screen, and click Done.
Once published, the trigger is listed as On Standby — active and waiting for a matching email. If you later edit it without republishing, it's flagged Outdated until you publish the new version.
Update an email trigger
Reopen the trigger from the Triggers page to edit it. A few things behave differently from creation:
The Email Configuration panel now shows the minted Trigger address in a copyable box instead of the "will be created on save" note — the same address stays valid, and no new one is minted on update.
You can change Allowed senders, Subject contains, and Body contains at any time to widen or narrow which emails fire the trigger.
On the Content step, the button reads Update prompt; edit the transform prompt or duration and apply it to change how future emails are handled. A Remove button clears the prompt so emails display as received again.
Remember to Save and Publish again — an edited trigger shows as Outdated until you do. If you try to close with unsaved edits, Fugo asks "Discard unsaved changes?" so you don't lose work.
Fire it by sending an email
Testing an email trigger is as simple as using it: send an email to the trigger's address (trig-xxxx@in.fugo.ai) from an account that satisfies your filters, and confirm the right content appears on your assigned screens.
For the email to fire the trigger it must pass every gate you set:
the sender is in Allowed senders (or any sender, if you left it empty);
the subject contains your Subject contains text, if set;
the body contains your Body contains text, if set.
On a match, Fugo overwrites the placeholder in place — displaying the email as received, or reformatted per your transform prompt — and plays it on the assigned screens for the configured duration (20 seconds by default). To confirm the reformat step, send a test email whose content clearly exercises your prompt (for example, an email with a headline and a date if your prompt asks for "the headline and key dates"), and check that the on-screen result matches what you asked for. Send another email to see the screen update again.
💡 If nothing appears, check the three filters first — a mismatched sender, subject keyword, or body keyword is the most common reason an email is silently ignored. Widen the filters, resend, and narrow them again once it's working.
Need more help?
If something isn't working as expected, reach out anytime. You can contact us through the chat box in the Fugo CMS or email support@fugo.ai, and our team will help you get everything running smoothly.
Don't have a Fugo account yet? Start a 14-day free trial: www.fugo.ai/app