HN Explorer

Ask HN: In what interesting ways do you parse emails for your web app?

2 points by daverecycles ↗ HN
You might be familiar with TripIt's email parsing feature. Basically, you forward trip itineraries and airfare/hotel booking confirmations to TripIt, and it imports it into TripIt for you. It made TripIt so much more useful and convenient.

Now I am working on a hosted email parsing service and I want to present data in a more useful format to web app developers. I started simple, extracting URLs and phone numbers from the email.

So I want to ask you, in what interesting ways do you parse emails for your web app? Or do you have any novel ideas?

Shameless plug: http://www.apinbox.com/ It's a free way to get incoming emails for your web app.

2 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 14.6 ms ] thread
smoody
you might want to give developers the ability to supply you with regex expressions perhaps and then do something like vary the post url/data based on any matches -- would enable matching of tech support ids or order ids, etc. but then again, developers can do the same thing in their code i guess, so you'd need a compelling reason as to why it should be done within your service.