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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Can someone share a use case?

It seems cool for... something.

edit: thanks all, very interesting.

Sure, so whenever someone cancels their Planscope account I send myself an email with their name, email address, LTV, plan, and cancelation reason (this is also stored in my database.)

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.

That's clever! I had never thought to CC/BCC into our parser...

I don't understand.. if you send automated emails to yourself in a human-friendly format, why not just use a Google API to push the same data into the spreadsheet at the same time?

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?

The difference is that you have to do new work every time the destination of the data changes. Using an interface to say "here are the relevant parts" is a lot nicer than having to code it yourself.

Or just push your entire object to google spreadsheet: https://github.com/firmafon/to_google_spreadsheet

you will have to change the zapier parser template as well when the destination format changes.

Brennan, thanks for sharing your use case. What kind of things would you do with the parsed info in Google spreadsheet?

Contacting users and offer a discount maybe?

I am playing with it now. I want to have my EZPass (RFID auto tolls) statements sent to my inbox. Right now I get an email with a url, then I have to type a PIN code, just to see my monthly statement.

I am too lazy to do it every month, but it would be nice the statements just appeared in my inbox.

Please publish this if you create it. Or somehow launch this into a service. EZPass emails are the bane of my existence because of how little information they give me versus how much I believe I have a right to know.

Can it fetch data from URL and parse it? The landing page doesn't mention this.

you can use kimonolabs.com / import.io for HTML parsing

Say you want LinkedIn messages to import to your CRM but they don't offer integration. Zapier the email notifications for your application. It's API by force, if companies don't let you in the front door just use another entrance.

One way we've seen it used is to parse out info from receipt emails into a spreadsheet or expense tool.

This is exactly what I'll be doing.

awesome use case.

how about -

1. Creating your own support desk 2. Automatically adding tasks to a calendar 3. Web scraping 4. Basic data collection

I've been thinking to develop a simple idonethis & Plivo integration where I need to parse the daily digest email and push the selected text as input for the text-to-speech app built using the Plivo API.

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.)

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