Stop polling: real-time email and calendar webhooks with Nylas

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. The CLI lists every available trigger so you don't have to guess the names: # All trigger types nylas webhook triggers # Only message-related triggers nylas webhook triggers --category message Webhooks are application-scoped, not grant-scoped: one webhook registered on your application receives notifications for every connected account, identified by the grant_id in each payload. See the notifications overview for the full event model. Before you begin You need a Nylas API key — webhook management is admin-level, so it uses the application's API key rather than a grant. You also need an HTTPS endpoint reachable from the public internet to receive the notifications. The CLI gets the key set up: nylas init # create an account, generate an API key For local de