dispatch-plugins

Dispatch channel extensions collected under a single parent directory.

Layout

• catalog/extensions.json - machine-readable extension catalog index
• channels/schema - shared manifest and catalog schema for channel plugins
• channels/discord - Discord interaction-webhook plugin
• channels/email - IMAP + SMTP email plugin
• channels/gmail - Gmail-focused IMAP + SMTP email plugin
• channels/outlook - Outlook / Microsoft 365 IMAP + SMTP email plugin
• channels/slack - Slack Events API / Socket Mode plugin
• channels/telegram - Telegram Bot API plugin
• channels/twilio-sms - Twilio SMS plugin
• channels/webhook - generic webhook plugin
• catalog - local catalog search and inspection helper

Channel availability

Plugin	Ingress availability	Upstream receive transport	Outbound delivery
channel-discord	Interaction webhook only	Host-managed HTTPS callback	Discord REST bot messages
channel-email	One-shot poll or background ingress session	IMAP polling worker inside the plugin	SMTP delivery
channel-gmail	One-shot poll or background ingress session	Gmail IMAP polling worker inside the plugin	Gmail SMTP delivery
channel-outlook	One-shot poll or background ingress session	Outlook / Microsoft 365 IMAP polling worker inside the plugin	Outlook / Microsoft 365 SMTP delivery
channel-slack	Events API webhook, one-shot Socket Mode poll, or background Socket Mode session	Host-managed HTTPS callback or Slack Socket Mode websocket	chat.postMessage or incoming webhook
channel-telegram	Bot API webhook, one-shot poll, or background poll session	Telegram webhook callback or Bot API getUpdates	sendMessage, sendPhoto, sendDocument
channel-twilio-sms	Twilio webhook only	Host-managed HTTPS callback	Twilio Messages API
channel-webhook	Generic webhook only	Host-managed HTTPS callback	JSON POST to configured endpoint

Dispatch integration

Channel plugins use dispatch-channel-protocol directly for the wire contract. The framing is still one JSON message per line on stdio, but the message shape inside that framing is JSON-RPC 2.0.

In practice:

• dispatch channel call exercises one-shot operations such as configure, health, deliver, push, and status
• dispatch channel listen runs webhook-style ingress bindings
• dispatch channel poll --once issues a one-shot poll_ingress request
• dispatch channel poll without --once runs background-ingress bindings for polling or sessioned upstream transports
• dispatch up manages project-level channel bindings from dispatch.toml

While an ingress session is active, Dispatch keeps the plugin subprocess alive and receives inbound activity as channel.event notifications. The upstream transport is plugin-specific: a plugin may translate that into repeated HTTP polling, an upstream websocket, or plain webhook callbacks.

Build layout

All in-repo plugins build from the repo-root workspace:

• cargo check --workspace --locked
• cargo test --workspace --locked

Notes

• channel-schema remains a repo-local crate for shared manifest and catalog types used by plugin tests and the catalog helper.
• Email-oriented plugins are still channels in Dispatch because they surface inbound user-originated messages and outbound replies through the same normalized conversation/event model as chat platforms.
• Email service variants stay service-specific at the plugin layer: channel-email, channel-gmail, and channel-outlook. Broader provider umbrellas such as Google or Microsoft can exist later as separate connector or tool surfaces without overloading the channel naming.
• catalog/extensions.json acts as the local catalog seed for install/search tooling and normalizes the plugin manifests into one searchable index. It covers only the plugins built and released from this repository; other first-party channel plugins (for example Signal and WhatsApp) ship from standalone repositories with their own catalogs. See dispatch/docs/plugin-ecosystem.md for the curated index of first-party plugin repositories.
• The protocol surface may still change as Dispatch hardens the channel runtime, so it should not yet be treated as a stable Dispatch core compatibility contract.