If your integration polls Nylas every minute to check for new email, you're doing too much work and still getting stale data. Polling is a tax: you burn rate limit on requests that mostly return nothing, and a message that arrives at 12:00:05 doesn't reach your app until the next poll. Webhooks flip that around. Nylas pushes a notification to your endpoint the moment something happens — a message arrives, an event changes, a contact is created — and your app reacts in real time.
This post walks the webhook surface from both sides: the HTTP API that registers and manages webhooks, and the Nylas CLI, which has genuinely useful tooling for the part everyone gets stuck on — verifying signatures and testing webhooks against local code. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I run when I'm wiring up a webhook receiver.
Triggers and destinations
A webhook has two halves: the trigger types it listens for and the destination URL it pushes to. Trigger types are dotted event names like message.created, event.updated, and contact.created, grouped into categories — grant, message, thread, event, contact, calendar, folder, and notetaker. You subscribe one destination to as many triggers as you want.
