Zapier Email Parser: Extract Text From Automated Emails
parser.zapier.com
parser.zapier.com
How many times do you get approached by customers or other vendors about "when are you going to integrate with XYZ" product? If you just integrate ONE time with Zapier, you're immediately connected with over 200 other online services. Then your answer to those customers/vendors can be: "We're integrated with Zapier, so you guys should integrate with them too and you'll get all the other benefits as well". With that answer you accomplish 2 things: 1) you shift the burden to them (2) you can use Zapier as a "testing ground" to see how popular an integration with a particular service is. If one particular Zapier connection starts taking off, then you can consider a direct integration. If only a few people use a particular service connection, then you haven't lost anything.
this is what a testimonial would be if testimonials were invented in 2014
The Zapier "Zapbook" automatically makes a page for each possible combination of the services they hook into, giving useless bullshit like https://zapier.com/zapbook/ducksboard/aim/ (which, by the way, isn't the same as https://zapier.com/zapbook/aim/ducksboard/ either).
"Sorry! This App Isn't Available Yet" spam is a frustrating thing to find when looking for converters between systems.
https://zapier.com/zapbook/drupal/zapier/
"Vote to connect Drupal and Zapier" brings up "Sorry! This App Isn't Available Yet". No integration is possible. It's a useless search result.
We have more information on using it in Zapier (the main use case at the moment) here: https://zapier.com/zapbook/updates/308/introducing-zapier-em...
How much boilerplate text do you need on either side of a token in order to identify it? Put another way, how much can the template emails vary? If the template format changes is there any sort of notification? Did you use the simplest implementation that could work or is this much more complicate than it looks?
First, download yourself a copy of Google's diff-match-patch.
Second, make a template for the email you have (think "Your shipment will be delivered {{date}}. Thank you!" vs. the original raw email "Your shipment will be delivered 2014-04-04. Thank you!").
Third, run it through diff-match-patch.
Forth, walk over the change tree and record the insertion (1), a deletion (-1) or equality (0) transformations (one as keys the other as values).
(There are a lot of edge cases to handle between the forth and fifth step, but test cases make those pretty obvious (if not very frustrating.)
Fifth, collate the keys/values into a dictionary and do some last minute cleanups.
We will be documenting a REST API so you can use parser.zapier.com directly, and it is pretty easy to forward emails automatically to our robot (so you can conceivably avoid writing anything at all and just use the app).
How would you prefer we contact you? There's no contact info on the site.
If the templates don't change at all (no ads, nothing contextual or optional) then this is possible, but in my experience emails have a surprising amount of variation when trying to do stuff like this. Paid with an online check this time versus a credit card? Billing address, last 4 numbers, etc might now be gone, which totally messes up the extraction.
Hopefully though people will be using this for more niche tools than Amazon receipts.
I don't know how Zapier works, but it is possible that they do some kind of fuzzy matching, that is robust to those things.
It seems cool for... something.
edit: thanks all, very interesting.
how about -
1. Creating your own support desk 2. Automatically adding tasks to a calendar 3. Web scraping 4. Basic data collection
With this, I could simply CC that email to Zapier, they'll yank out all that info and shove it into a Google Spreadsheet, which will let me do certain things that would be a pain to program myself.
Zapier may be really cool, but it still seems like you're taking raw data, converting it to human-readable form, then sending that to Zapier to attempt to extract the raw data again. Or am I misunderstanding?
I am too lazy to do it every month, but it would be nice the statements just appeared in my inbox.
This is more than awesome for my use case.
[edit] Incidentally has anyone found it rewarding to "hear" what you get done for the day? (another pleasure cream added on top of checking items off your to-do list.)
We are doing the same at http://mailparser.io and I can confirm that there is a real need for a solution like that. A lot of our existing customers use mailparser.io in combination with Zapier. Those customers can now directly use the parser of Zapier. Which sucks for us but which is surely great for the customer and Zapier ... :-)
One caveat though, a lot of use-cases are not the static "contact form" email where nothing moves except the values. We get a lot of requests for parsing lists, tables etc. Curious how the chosen approach works on this kind of parsing jobs.
Random site example: peoplewhodance.net/events/NYE/schedule.html
As a tech guy, business people routinely dump big piles of raw data in my office every few days. I mutter a bit about how this is why we invented databases and then laugh all the way to the bank.
And I guarantee you the business people don't feel at all guilty about it.
It's basically a visual drag-and-drop tool to automate business processes.
You can drag-and-drop many different actions together (including email) to automate and track many processes you organization might have.
I would love to hear your feedback as we are just getting off the ground.
I was a bit taken aback by that.
https://developers.google.com/schemas/tutorials/google-now-c...
I forward all my work flight itineraries to Gmail (so I get Google Now notifications) after cut & pasting them out of the Word document I get them in.
Gmail parses them and displays them using the "Flight details" format, even though there is none of the information required for the "Actions" thing linked above.
When developer / brands create emails following Gmail quick action guidelines, and you have Google Now enabled, then you will see Google Now cards.
I cut and paste plain text out of a word document and send it, and that triggers the Google Now cards.
It's parsing
The explanation, the first paragraph simply doesn't really give a clear idea on what it does and what's the benefit for me, and, imho a random user is not really motivated to try and figure it out.
I believe a simple nice diagram
[email] -> [zapier] -> [internet]
with some example integrated in it would do a much better job.
I know there are things like logstash, but this one seems like something that could be complementary. What about feeding log files for known events, and, I don't know, have a pretty dashboard will all the stats or something? what other use for this feature plus logging can you think of?
Disclaimer: I'm currently thinking of a way of doing logging and security audits to some CA server I'm about to configure, so right now everything looks like a nail I guess...
sample mail: http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/?u=439aa16a39e4b10e0b65ff2e...
If you need support for more complex emails and extraction rules, you might look into using http://mailparser.io/.
Very nifty concept.
Here's a demo you can play around with: http://nathanathan.com/fuzzyTemplateMatcher/