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Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

mailparser.io

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

#21
post #13

Hey guys! I built something like this to scratch an itch at Zapier (both personally and for a few of our customers). I've mulled over releasing it someday for fun. This is a real need because (frighteningly?) a majority of the business world runs on: * Generated emails * Spreadsheets First of all, I realize this stuff can get complex. But I have one major critique: your extractor UI is way way way too complex. It sho…

Hi Bryan, thanks a lot for testing it and giving some feedback! I really appreciate it. The whole idea is based on exactly the assumption you mentioned: there are a lot of businesses who are stuck with clunky workflows of copy&pasting data. But who do I tell, you know that. Regarding your issue with the extractor UI: Your screenshot is showing the second out of three steps. The purpose of this step is to refine the d…

I saw that. I still think it needs a lot of simplification. But don't let me rain on your parade, the app is done very well so far. You are clearly good hackers working on a real problem, so it will get sussed out in time I expect.

I might very well be wrong too, it wouldn't be the first time!

Re: Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

#22
post #13

Hey guys! I built something like this to scratch an itch at Zapier (both personally and for a few of our customers). I've mulled over releasing it someday for fun. This is a real need because (frighteningly?) a majority of the business world runs on: * Generated emails * Spreadsheets First of all, I realize this stuff can get complex. But I have one major critique: your extractor UI is way way way too complex. It sho…

We spent a LOT of time on our extractor UI at http://getdispatch.com :) Add fields, highlight parts of your email, fields are mapped!

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

#23
"All you need to do is to send emails to us." - no thanks. If you've built something more sophisticated than I can implement with Perl and Exim's system filter functionality, I might be interested in giving you money to save me my time. Maybe a per-domain license?

Re: Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

#24
I haven't fully automated this, but I've been using BBedit's batch regex to parse emails. Since these are emails coming from our iPhone app, they're all pretty generic in terms of payload (a few sentences). I just throw a months worth of emails into a folder, regex it, word cloud it, and then I see what people are yammering about the most.

Re: Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

#25

I just recently decided that I wanted an in-house solution to inbound email handling (the user can send emails into the server containing commands to run) as I didn't like the expense or having to rely on an external service to do it for me. In the space of about half a day I had a working test bed: * Vanilla Postfix * A user with a .forward file, calling curl to post the email to my receiver route on my app * A rece…

Rather you than me... I set something up using mailgun which has been brilliant, both on the receiving and sending side. For small scale use cases like this it's free too. I send pictures of receipts from my phone to a special email and mailgun POSTs to a tiny Heroku webapp which parses the subject line for amount, currency and date and puts into out accounting software.

You get all sorts of goodies like nice attachment handling and automatic stripping out of quoted text which aren't exactly hard but fiddly.

Re: Show HN: mailparser.io - extract data from inbound emails

#26
post #15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Mandrill is for sending out e-mails, which is quite different from what this post is about.

Updated patent to emphasize that this is why I'm mentioning it: They offer an inbound feature which isn't emphasized!

So does SendGrid.com
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