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Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

blog.postmarkapp.com

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Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#31

Post by neilparikh »

bryanh wrote: post #23

Parsing email is a real pain point, kudos to Postmark for trying to solve it. However, I need this functionality in a more abstracted way, not locked to a email address. I'm thinking about taking a swing at it myself and GPL'ing it. (Basically full fledged IMAP->JSON.) For a real world example, at my startup https://zapier.com/ we have "new email received" or "new email tagged in Gmail" as one of the many, many input…

http://context.io/ provides an API for looking at the contents of a email account through IMAP, if that's what you're looking for.

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#32

Post by orenmazor »

delano wrote: post #28
bryanh wrote: post #23

Parsing email is a real pain point, kudos to Postmark for trying to solve it. However, I need this functionality in a more abstracted way, not locked to a email address. I'm thinking about taking a swing at it myself and GPL'ing it. (Basically full fledged IMAP->JSON.) For a real world example, at my startup https://zapier.com/ we have "new email received" or "new email tagged in Gmail" as one of the many, many input…

http://lamsonproject.org/

that is awesome! I'll be watching this project. lots of potential when it matures.

I always laugh when I see somebody say: "…uses friendly regular expressions".

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#33

Post by bthomas »

I'd love an email API that you could forward an email thread to, which would be parsed into a set of linked emails with contacts attached. Email to JSON is great, but not when the body is the text of 20 forwarded emails. Seems like a gimme for a CRM app -- does anybody provide this?

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#34

Post by efedorenko »

anderspetersson wrote: post #26
alexknowshtml wrote: post #2

We've got more in store for this feature set, but we're really excited about this as a start - we use it ourselves at beanstalkapp.com and I know that a number of people HN were using the beta. I'm happy to answer any questions, or field any ideas you might have.

Hey, finally it launched, will definitely come in handy. I found a bug in the docs: On http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-inbound-parse.htm... the link named 'API developer email list' links to 'file://localhost/Users/alexhillman/Sites/wildbit/postmark-design/docs/groups.google.com/group/postmark-api-developers/'

Thanks for letting us know! Already fixed.

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#35

Post by orenmazor »

buro9 wrote: post #16

Wouldn't it be great if there was a standard JSON representation of an email, and that multiple providers (SendGrid, AWS SES, MailJet, ElasticEmail, etc) all then provided such an interface. So not only could you choose (swap out very very quickly) your outbound provider, but also your inbound provider. After the thread the other day on outbound email, I ended up choosing MailJet who have been wonderful with the ques…

Hey David, what kind of stats did you have in mind on inbound?

The topic is a constantly discussed one, however at some point you cross the line from handling email to handling CRM related tasks and there are better tools/patterns to dealing with that.

I'd love to hear what you have in mind: oren@wildbit.com

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#36

Post by dougzor »

bryanh wrote: post #30
delano wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://lamsonproject.org/

Looks interested, without having the chance to give the docs a one over, does it do IMAP as well? Looks more focused on SMTP/sendmail.

At it's core Lamson is just a really sweet wrapper around smtpd (http://docs.python.org/library/smtpd.html) using asyncore for asynchronous socket IO.

When a mail is received you can optionally process it and when done processing you can drop it on the floor (e.g. you're done with it) or you can send it to a 'relay' which means a IMAP or POP server (or really anything) if you so choose.

I would generally say that yes, lamson is much more focused on receiving email via SMTP and doing [smart] processing on it.

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#37

Post by epicviking »

This got me thinking... Are there any startups that are doing something similar with physical mail? I can picture a large centralized mail room with a bunch of industrial sized scanners, mail gets opened, scanned, and uploaded. Customers could access pdfs of their daily mail through a Web interface and could search through archives. Through in some super OCR and I think you'd really have something...

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#39

Post by orenmazor »

epicviking wrote: post #37

This got me thinking... Are there any startups that are doing something similar with physical mail? I can picture a large centralized mail room with a bunch of industrial sized scanners, mail gets opened, scanned, and uploaded. Customers could access pdfs of their daily mail through a Web interface and could search through archives. Through in some super OCR and I think you'd really have something...

You know, when I started working on Postmark I thought that would make a fantastic April Fools joke.

then I discovered there really is a company that tries to do that. I can't remember the name though…

Re: Postmark introduces easy inbound email processing for all accounts

#40

Post by bryanh »

dougzor wrote: post #36
bryanh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks interested, without having the chance to give the docs a one over, does it do IMAP as well? Looks more focused on SMTP/sendmail.

At it's core Lamson is just a really sweet wrapper around smtpd ( http://docs.python.org/library/smtpd.html ) using asyncore for asynchronous socket IO. When a mail is received you can optionally process it and when done processing you can drop it on the floor (e.g. you're done with it) or you can send it to a 'relay' which means a IMAP or POP server (or really anything) if you so choose. I would generally say that y…

I would imagine that its parsing functionality could be a boon to someone wanting to do something higher level with IMAP. Thanks for the response.
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