Add via Receipt: A Frictionless Way to Add Wine to Your Cellar

This is a submission for the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators.

What I Built

At CellarTracker, we help wine collectors track their cellars and tasting experiences. I built the Add via Receipt feature which allows users to forward wine purchase receipts and have those wines automatically parsed and added to their collection.

This dramatically reduces friction for collectors, especially those buying wine regularly from online or brick-and-mortar retailers. It eliminates the tedious manual entry process and makes cellar management as simple as sending an email.

We now support:

• Text-based receipts (from emails)
• PDF receipts
• Image-based receipts (like photos of a printed receipt)

Backstory

I originally attempted to implement this feature using Office365 shared inboxes. As a developer, this was an absolute nightmare. OAuth was convoluted, IMAP polling was unreliable, and basic webhook-style delivery for incoming mail was simply not available.

After wasting far too much time wrangling OAuth tokens and dealing with Outlook's strange throttling and error behaviors, I made the switch to Postmark, and it was like night and day.

Postmark’s inbound webhooks were easy to configure, fast to process, and—critically—reliable. It’s now a core part of how thousands of users add wine to their cellars every month.

Demo

You can try this feature live on https://www.cellartracker.com or through our new mobile app (available on iOS and Android).

1. Forward a receipt to [email protected] from your CellarTracker-associated email.
2. Wait a few seconds (usually < 1 minute).
3. Open the mobile app and you'll see a notification for the wines being ready to review.

Screenshots and video demo coming soon!

Code Repository

This is part of our production codebase and is not currently open source, but we’re happy to share implementation details and design decisions.

How I Built It

• Inbound email: Postmark Inbound Webhooks
• Processing stack: Azure Functions
• Parsing PDFs and images: Azure OpenAI
• Wine matching: Fuzzy string matching and normalization against our 4M+ wine record database
• UX: Mobile built with React Native

Why This Matters

Wine collectors often receive many receipts and invoices each month. Our users can now simply forward them—whether it’s a digital invoice, a photo from a store visit, or a fancy printed receipt—and CellarTracker handles the rest.

Thanks to Postmark, this was fast, robust, and dev-friendly to build.