WHAT’S AN EMAIL PARSER?

To parse literally means “to break down into components.” Typically, reading an email involves sorting out the important bits and figuring out what to do with them. Do they need to be forwarded on to other people? Do sales records need to be updated? This process of mentally extracting important details from an email and putting them somewhere else takes up valuable time. If a bottleneck develops in simply getting data from your email to the right people or software, your business suffers.

An email parser gives you time back, eliminates bottlenecks, and improves your efficiency. It’s a tool that will automatically parse your email into useful components, ready to be sent wherever they need to go. We have more on “What is an email parser“, in this post. In this post we will discuss the Zapier email parser and Mailparser as an alternative to Zapier email parser.

WHAT DOES ZAPIER EMAIL PARSER DO WELL?

The Zapier email parser is a nice option for many email parser needs. It is easy to set up as many individual mailboxes as you need, one for each format of incoming email you want parsed. The key to getting the Zapier parser to function well is the formatting of the incoming emails. Each data field should be on a separate line or separated by a non-space delimiter. If this is the case, the Zapier email parser will work well and save you time. Also, the Zapier email parser is free, this is fantastic for users that are in need of a lightweight solution with the flexibility to pass data to other Zapier supported integrations.

Once your parsing templates are set up and functioning properly, it is easy to use the Zapier email parser as the trigger app in any “Zap”. Popular zaps include sending parsed data to Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Slack, and Mailchimp. When template emails are simple and consistent, it makes perfect sense to stick with the Zapier email parser. They offer a really solid tool, with exceptional support.

When you need more advanced options, specifically flexibility in the formatting email data, a great alternative to Zapier email parser is Mailparser.

WHAT DOES MAILPARSER DO WELL?

Mailparser does everything the Zapier email parser does, but it is just more robust/powerful. Read on or sign up for a free subscription and see for yourself.

Extract Data from Tables

Mailparser comes with powerful table and list parsing filters. Whether you need to extract table rows, repeating text blocks or conditional text filters on table data, we have you covered. Once you have your table data, you can add many advanced table filters to post-process your data.

Attachment Parsing

Should you want to extract data from emails AND attachments then you have come to the right place. Right now it is possible to extract text from:

• Simple .pdf documents
• Simple .xls, .xlxs, and .csv Spreadsheets
• .txt files
• .xml files

No matter which file format, the text will be extracted and is then available as if it was text in the body of the email. Read more here on attachment parsing.

Advanced Data Capture Filters & Post Processing

A couple of our most used filters are described below. They allow you to clean up and extract the data you want, and even post process the data that you have already sent to your inboxes.

• Text filters allow you to set start and end positions for finding text, effectively cutting away everything you don’t need for that particular parsing rule. This eliminates the condition that each data point be on a separate line.
• Cell quantity and cell content filters allow you to extract data from a table, even when table sizes are variable.
• Filter out entire emails from the mailbox (to be ignored by the parser) if they don’t contain a certain word(s).
• Keyword filters direct the parser to search for specific keywords and return a specified value for each email containing those keywords.
• Date formatting, can change the format of the date field
• Time zone formatting, convert the timestamp to a different time zone
• Text modification, including split the name field into first and last name, change capitalization, and normalize the postal address.
• The above are just a couple of literally thousands of ways to stack filters to enhance granular data extraction.

Direct Excel/CSV/JSON/XML Export

Many users want nothing more than to dump their data as a backup for later use to archive, or to upload that file to another application. We allow you to export your data into many popular formats, and set the parameters on the time frame of the data you wish to export.

Integrations with Zapier and other platforms

Zapier is the leading platform “connector” on the market. You can connect your Mailparser account to any App on Zapier. We also have a Microsoft Flow partnership. This is much the same relationship where parsed email data can be sent through Microsoft Flow, and on to your favorite Apps. Add to that our native integrations with Salesforce, Zoho, Google Sheets and you have a tons of options for platform integrations.

Other things we do

• Mailbox duplication, including all parsing rules, filters, and webhooks associated with that mailbox
• Individual parsing rule duplication, ability to copy the duplicates to other mailboxes
• Direct upload of .eml files for bulk processing
• Automatic parsing rules, created by the parser based on the template email

Hopefully the above scenarios illustrate the value of the Zapier email parser and Mailparser. Also, the differences a user might be interested in based on their use case.