What is email parsing?

What is an email parser or inbox parser?

An email parser, or inbox parser, is machine learning-powered software that can extract a piece of unstructured data from an email. A parser analyzes incoming emails and identifies information within them, such as the sender’s name, the subject line, and any attachments. This information is then stored for easy access and retrieval. 

What is email parsing used for?

Email parsing is used for: 

• Automating customer support: Customer service teams can quickly extract data from customer emails and route it to the appropriate teams. This allows them to resolve requests more efficiently.
• Improving data extraction: Teams can better analyze large amounts of incoming data, such as sales leads or user feedback.
• Enhancing marketing campaigns: By analyzing incoming emails, marketers can determine which leads are likely to convert into paying customers. This helps them tailor their campaigns more effectively and target their email content appropriately. 
• Easing customer segmentation: Segment customers based on their interests or purchase history, allowing for more personalized outreach efforts.
• Personalize offers and promotions: Email data on purchase preferences and order history allows you to create personalized add-on recommendations as the customer is completing their purchase.
• Provide real-time shipping updates: Extracting order and shipping data to provide customers with a single view to track and manage their orders. It can also conduct multi-carrier delivery tracking by consolidating orders from different carriers into one view.
• Simplifying administrative tasks: Can be used for invoicing, account reconciliation, or generating reports. This eliminates the need for manual input, saving valuable time and resources while ensuring accuracy in the process.
• Streamlining collaboration between teams: By extracting relevant information from incoming emails, teams can ensure they are always working with up-to-date information regardless of its origin or format.

Email Parsers types

Structured email parsers

Parsing structured email data refers to the process of extracting and processing structured information (data easily read and stored elsewhere) contained in email messages. Structured email data refers to email data with a well-defined format, such as a specific layout, set of fields, or encoding standards. 

Parsing structured email data typically involves using software tools to extract specific information from the message and convert it into a consumable format, such as CSV or JSON. This information can then be used for data analysis, reporting, or integration with other systems. The specific method of parsing structured email data will depend on the format of the email message and the desired output.

Unstructured email parsers

Parsing unstructured email data involves extracting unstructured email data and converting it into a structured format. Unstructured email data refers to information in emails that doesn’t have a well-defined format, and typically contain a mix of text, images, and attachments. It’s much more difficult and time-consuming than parsing structured data. 

How does email/inbox parsing work?

Inbox parsing, or email parsing, works by analyzing incoming email messages and extracting specific information from them. The process typically involves the following steps:

1. Users must give consent for inbox parsers to access their inbox. 
2. Then, the email parsing software connects to the email server and retrieves incoming email messages.
3. The software analyzes the structure of each email message, including the header, subject, and body text.
4. The software uses machine learning, natural language processing, and regular expressions to identify and extract relevant information from each message. 
5. The extracted data is organized into a structured format, such as CSV or JSON, for further processing and analysis.
6. Depending on the specific application, the extracted data may be used to trigger actions in other systems, such as updating customer records, tracking leads, or processing orders.

Take a deeper dive into how inbox parsing works here: Parse an Email Inbox With Python

Benefits of email/inbox parsing

Now that we’ve covered the basics of email/inbox parsing and its uses, let’s examine some of the benefits.

Easily extract data at scale

Parsing emails involves extracting specific pieces of data from incoming emails using API requests, which works in a similar way to a search engine that scrapes the web for particular information. Effective inbox parsing solutions can extract email content and transfer it to a predetermined location based on a set of rules.

Some examples of data that can be parsed from emails include: 

• Email metadata
• Subject lines
• Send dates/times
• Open dates/times
• Reply dates/times
• Attachments
• Signature data
• Links/hyperlinks. 

Context-rich insights

The data contained in a customer’s email is context-rich, direct, and up-to-date. Web analytics or third-party research provide passive insights that can already be months old. Access to comprehensive first-party data is essential for driving personalized customer experiences and is more secure and accurate than third-party cookies. 

An email parser allows businesses to pull the highly valuable data in their customers’ inboxes so they can build more engaging purchasing experiences that will help drive repurchases and keep acquisition costs low.

Improved customer experience 

By pulling data and tapping into context-rich insights, businesses can improve their understanding of their customers. This allows them to create more personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey that can lead to increased customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and reduced acquisition costs.

Ready to improve your customer experience?

Easily add email parsing capabilities to your application with the Nylas API.

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How to use an API for email parsing 

This is the high-level process for using an API for email parsing:

• Register for an API Key: To access the API, you need to sign up for an API key from the provider. This key is used to authenticate your API requests.
• Integrate the API into your application: Depending on the API provider, you can either use a REST API or a library provided by the provider to integrate the API into your application.
• Parse the email data: Once you have integrated the API, you can extract data from incoming email messages using the API. The data can be returned in various formats such as JSON, XML, or CSV, depending on the API provider.
• Store and process the data: The extracted data can then be stored in your database or used to trigger actions such as updating customer records, tracking leads, or processing orders.
• Monitor usage and performance: You should monitor the usage and performance of the API to ensure that it is functioning correctly and that you are getting the desired results.

Benefits of using an API

Using an API for email parsing can provide several benefits for developers, businesses, and their end users. Some of the key benefits include:

• APIs allow developers to integrate email parsing functionality into existing systems, applications, and workflows.
• By automating the process of extracting data, APIs can help improve efficiency and productivity, saving developers months, or even years in development time. APIs also enable businesses to launch products faster, ultimately saving business costs. 
• APIs provide a convenient and standardized way to access and extract data by parsing unstructured text into useful information. It also ensures that the extracted data is consistent and accurate. 
• APIs can provide real-time insights into customer behavior and interactions, allowing businesses to respond quickly to changing customer needs.

Add email parsing capabilities with Nylas

The Nylas email parsing solution helps companies build a data-driven e-commerce powerhouse. The service automates data extraction to unlock first-party insights from your customers’ inboxes. 

Businesses can now overcome the challenges of managing multiple provider integrations, creating data uniformity across providers, and building individual data connectors for each provider. Nylas also solves data engineering challenges by ensuring the communications data is structured to fit pre-defined schemas so it’s readily available for integration or analysis within applications. 

By leveraging economies of scale and AI-powered email parsers, the Nylas API can process massive quantities of representative data with a high level of precision – without the exorbitant costs of building your own solution.

We process billions of financial transactions each day. The Nylas platform provides us with a secure, scalable solution for extracting purchase and delivery data from user emails and surfacing it in our app in real-time.

– Product Lead at Global Fintech Platform

With the data pulled from Nylas email parsing, you can transform the customer experience to maximize repurchases, retention, and gross merchandise value.