5 Ways to Hack Help Desk Automation With Mailparser

How to Extract Data from Support Emails with Mailparser

To show you how to get Mailparser up and running, we’re going to use an example of a support email. To build your support email parser, follow these five simple steps:

Step 1: Sign up for a free trial

Start by signing up for a free trial account. You don’t need to enter your credit card information.

Mailparser will ask you to share a few details about your company, namely your industry, company size and name, how many emails you want to parse and how many you receive. Providing these details is optional, but we recommend you do it to have an optimized user experience.

Step 2: Create your first Mailparser inbox

In Mailparser, you can have multiple inboxes, each for a different type of recurring emails. So you want to create your first inbox where you will receive your support emails.

Right after creating your account, you will see a prompt to create your first inbox. Click on the button and type a name for your inbox.

Mailparser will then generate an email address for your inbox.

Step 3: Forward a sample support email to your inbox

Forward at least one or two support emails to your Mailparser inbox address. Next, select your inbox from your dashboard. You will find your forwarded email(s) in the ‘Emails’ section.

It’s time to create some Parsing Rules, which are the instructions that Mailparser’s algorithms follow to identify data and extract it. For each data field (e.g. the customer’s name, their email address, etc.), you want to create a specific Parsing Rule. Let’s see how that works.

Step 4: Create Parsing Rules

In the left-hand side panel, click on the ‘Rules’ section. You have a choice between creating your first Parsing Rule manually or trying the Automatic Setup which can create Rules based on the contents of your email. Let’s go with the second option; click on ‘Try Automatic Setup’.

Use the Automatic Setup

We can see here that Mailparser has automatically created a bunch of Parsing Rules. Pretty convenient, right? Information like the enquiry number, the category of the inquiry, the customer name, their email address, and the order number has already been extracted accurately. This is a great template to work with.

Now, we just need to create a Rule for the customer’s message which the Automatic Setup hasn’t recognized correctly. To do this, scroll down through the menu on the left and click on ‘Start with this template’.

Create a Parsing Rule for the customer message

Once again, go to the ‘Rules’ section. In the list of Parsing Rules, select the last one and delete it since it’s irrelevant.

After that, select the Rule ‘Message’ and click on the ‘Edit’ icon to the right.

In the Rule editor, you’ll see that the sample email’s body is set as the data source. You also have a choice between the HTML or plain text version of the email. Select ‘Plain Text’.

We’re going to add a text filter to tell Mailparser where to look for the data field we want. Scroll down and click on the button ‘Add Text Filter’. Move your cursor over to ‘Set Start & End Position’, then select ‘Find Start Position’.

In the case of this email, the customer’s message starts below the word ‘Message:’. The text filter is set to « text match: after » by default, so type ‘Message:’ in the text field next to it. The editor will remove all the data that comes before ‘Message:’

Next, we want to remove the empty lines that come before the actual message. To do that, add a second text filter, but this time, go to ‘Replace, Remove & Insert’ and select ‘Remove Lines & Entities’.

In the dropdown list that appears, the option ‘Remove empty lines’ is selected by default. So all the empty lines from the raw data will go away.

Alright, so now we have successfully isolated the customer’s message. But it would be better to have the message in a single paragraph instead of several ones. So let’s add a third text filter. Like the last one, choose ‘Replace, Remove & Insert’ followed by ‘Remove Lines & Entities’. Open the dropdown list and select ‘Remove line breaks’. The text filter will regroup the entire message in a single paragraph.

See how easy creating Rules is?

Scroll down to the bottom of the editor and click on ‘OK, Looks Good!’. Validate the name of this Parsing Rule, which is already set as ‘Message’. Lastly, save your Rule by clicking on ‘Validate & Save’. That’s it!

Step 5: Download or export your extracted data

In this final step, choose whether you want to download your extracted data as a file or export it to a cloud app.

Option 1: Download your data

If you want to download the parsed data as a spreadsheet file, go to the ‘Downloads’ section and click on ‘Create First Download Link’.

Choose the format you want: XLS, CSV, JSON, or XML. Type a name for your file, scroll down, and click on ‘Save’. Mailparser will generate a download link; click on it and save your file. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

Option 2: Export your data

If you want to send your parsed data to a cloud app, go to the ‘Integrations’ section instead and click on ‘Add New Integration’.

You’ll see a variety of integration options, from Google Sheets to Salesforce, Zapier, and more. Choose the one you want and follow the simple instructions provided. Basically, you will need to log in to your account on the cloud app you choose in order to connect Mailparser to it, and then select the location where you want your parsed data to go.