How can I stop a Trello Email-to-Board forwarding loop without disabling email forwarding?

Question

Hello,

We use Trello as an operational command center for our facility management company.

We have the following setup:

Customer / Sender → destek@kbcgrup.com → Trello Email-to-Board address → Card created in our Trello Inbox list

This works correctly and we want to keep this forwarding active.

However, we have a loop problem.

When Trello sends notification emails (for example from do-not-reply@trello.com) to destek@kbcgrup.com, our mail server automatically forwards these emails back to our Trello Email-to-Board address. As a result, Trello's own notification emails create new cards in Trello, which can generate unnecessary duplicate cards and a forwarding loop.

Our Trello email notification frequency is already set to “Never”, but the problem still occurs with some Trello-generated emails.

Our hosting provider has confirmed that sender-based forwarding exclusions are not supported on our mail server. Therefore, we cannot simply exclude do-not-reply@trello.com while forwarding all other incoming emails.

What we need is:

Keep forwarding all normal emails received at destek@kbcgrup.com to our Trello board, but prevent Trello-generated emails from creating new cards when they are forwarded back to the Email-to-Board address.

Is there a Trello-side solution, filter, automation, rule, or other workaround that can prevent this loop without disabling Email-to-Board forwarding?

Thank you very much for your help.

İsmail Kibici

Josh · Answer

Hi, Arek's fix (moving your Trello account to a dedicated address, so Trello's own emails never reach destek@) removes the cause. If you also want a Trello-side safety net, board automation can catch the looped cards as they arrive:

* Open the board > Automation > Rules > Create rule.
* Trigger: when a card is emailed into the board. It's the "card added to" trigger, with "emailed into" picked from its dropdown.
* Click the filter icon on the trigger and add a name contains filter. The email subject becomes the card title, so open a few of the looped cards and take a word or phrase that only Trello's emails use. For several phrases you can use a regex, e.g. regex:/.*(phrase one|phrase two).*/.
* Action: archive the card (or move it to a "Filtered" list if you'd rather check it first).

This doesn't stop the email reaching Trello, but it clears the card straight away, so nothing piles up in your Inbox list. Test it with one or two looped messages first, so you know the filter doesn't catch a real customer email with a similar subject.

One more thing: if the Email-to-board address has leaked anywhere it shouldn't be, you can reset it from the board menu > Email-to-board > Reset email address. The old address stops working immediately, so update the forward on destek@ right after.

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hello

Because destek@kbcgrup.com is both your Trello account email and your forwarding address, Trello system emails get sent to destek@ and forwarded right back into Trello, creating an infinite loop. Change your Trello account email to a dedicated address (like trello-admin@kbcgrup.com) while keeping destek@ purely for forwarding customer emails. Alternatively, set a filter on your mail server to block emails from Trello before forwarding.

Best,

Arek🤠