

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

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bryanh
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 should be
outrageously simple. As in, here are your emails, highlight the data you want
to extract. It's hard to build, I know, but I have doubts that your average
user will sit through this:
[http://i.imgur.com/5xjy4dS.png](http://i.imgur.com/5xjy4dS.png).

The concept is great though. The landing page is wonderful. Simple, to the
point, decent use cases, inside the app has a nice onboarding and great
options around exporting, etc... I really dig it.

Best of luck guys!

~~~
krakaukiosk
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 data
selected in the first step. If you are sending html emails (with dom elements
like h1, links, tables etc.) you can directly select the data in the first
step with your mouse. So you don't need to refine the whole email body in the
second step.

~~~
bryanh
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!

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beefsack
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 receiver in my Go app using the inbuilt mail package

* Logic to recursively parse multipart emails to extract plain text where possible, or strip tags from HTML when there is no text/plain version

I've been amazed at the performance and the reliability of it even in staging.
It automatically emails back a confirmation of the commands and the
confirmation comes back lightning quick, back through the Postfix server.

Anyone considering creating their own inbound email handler shouldn't be
scared to have a crack, I was amazed at how simple and rewarding it was.

~~~
dbuxton
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.

------
jtheory
There's no mention of security, or the trust involved in outsourcing email
workflow handling to you.

The interest for attackers isn't as high as something like LastPass, but _at a
bare minimum_ a successful hack will come back with a big list of valid email
addresses and companies they have relationships with -- which would be very
valuable to someone interested in spoofing, for example.

And that's assuming that the people/person behind mailparser.io are honest.

It depends on what kind of data your clients might want to handle in email
workflow, but I imagine most businesses will be wary of passing off
potentially sensitive material to an outside party that they don't trust.
Things like "first month free" don't address this -- the fear isn't "we'll try
this service and it won't work for us, and our money will be wasted", it's
"we'll try this service, and an employee or hacker will sell our data to
competitors, spam/upsell our customers, sell our contact lists...".

Obviously these aren't the most likely scenarios, but it's a bit like hiring a
new employee who will be working _completely without oversight_ with your
company data... You'd want to put serious time into interviews, checking
references, etc..

The site as-is: as far as I can tell, there are no human beings behind the
site, or any established company. There's no phone number or address. It's not
even clear what country (and hence legal jurisdiction) the business is
operating in.

I don't mean to come off as too negative -- there are still companies that
will not have a problem with the risks (and/or for whom the risks will be
minimal), but you'll cast a wider net with a more solid presence.

------
rgrieselhuber
I have a need for something like this and had been planning to use Mailgun.
Perhaps some additional information on your site explaining how you guys are
different would help people decide.

~~~
krakaukiosk
thanks for pointing this out, we will surely improve our copy regarding your
feedback!

To answer your question meanwhile: mailgun provides an API for developers who
want to route incoming emails to their app. mailparser.io however tries to
target the tech-savvy businness owner who wants to automate his email
workflow, notable who wants to extract data from repetive automated emails. We
see mailparser.io more in the corner of zapier and ifttt.

~~~
rgrieselhuber
That's very helpful, thanks!

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LogicX
We ([http://metascribe.com](http://metascribe.com)) use mandrill from
mailchimp for our inbound mail which appears for now to be free - works great
for our purposes. Everyone thinks of them as only outbound and inbound is not
a function they highlight, so figured I'd mention it.

[http://Mandrill.com](http://Mandrill.com)

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

~~~
LogicX
Updated patent to emphasize that this is why I'm mentioning it:

They offer an inbound feature which isn't emphasized!

~~~
g8oz
So does SendGrid.com

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tmchow
Kudos on having a "use cases" section on your site. More services need to
include this type of info.

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jrabone
"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?

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tegansnyder
Thanks for sharing. I have been a similar service called Cloudmailin.com to
extract tracking numbers from third party drop shipping suppliers. They have a
decent API, might have to check out your service next time I need to set one
up.

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gdilla
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.

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jf22
I was just about to click your call to action but the carousel switched.

[http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

Carousels are bad. Stop using them.

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prakster
Signed up; how do I parse the text in the Body of the email? Is there a
tutorial?

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ismaelc
Cool service! How can I secure the result dispatcher though? It seems to
generate random character combinations at the end of the base URL. But someone
might 'randomly' get my mailparser emails

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pallandt
Interesting :) I was about to ask what are the typical use cases for this, but
then I noticed the quite prominent 'Use Cases' menu link.

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chezmo
this could actually be interesting for event organizers. one could forward
their rsvp@event.com email address to mailparser.io and get a csv file back
with all the attendee names in it.

