Sending JSON in body of an email

Question

Basically, in our scenario, data has to be sent from a WordPress form to Dynamics 365. My current approach is putting it into an email body in JSON format, that is then extracted and further processed by Power Automate flow. ("Power Automate" is Microsoft's "low code" / "no code" product)

Everything is working fine but there is a disagreement in the team if this is a viable approach or not.

I know Dynamics offers an API, and I could use that also. But my idea for choosing an email over API is to adopt 'low code no code' approach wherever possible. On the other hand, I think the API code would require higher development skills every time to change or fix something.

So are there any caveats we should be aware of, specifically regardimg maintenance and/or robustness?

Answer 1

This is a slightly creative architecture, but generally fine. Some caveats:

• Email is notoriously unreliable: emails may arrive delayed, out of order, or not at all.

• Emails are not necessarily encrypted in transit, though in practice it's possible to ensure that hops between known servers will use an encrypted connection.

• The content of plaintext emails is typically line-wrapped, which could damage the JSON contents. Avoid this by setting an appropriate MIME type for the content or by sending the JSON as an attachment.

Answer 2

JSON in the email body is problematic. Mostly because it’s between hard and impossible to guarantee that an email body isn’t modified by anyone. JSON in an attachment is just fine, especially if you encrypt it.