Do you have hundreds or thousands of inbound emails in your Inbox with important data fields? Maybe your business is receiving leads or order confirmations by email and you find yourself doing the same manual copy & paste routine every day. If this is the case, we have a very neat discovery for you today. In this article we’ll show you how you can Download Emails tFo Excel.
What is an Email Parser?
Before showing you how easy it is to automatically copy email data to Excel, let’s have a quick look at the technology. An email parser is a software whose purpose is to extract certain data fields from emails. With data fields, we mean things like First Name, Street, Company Name,Order Reference, etc.
Imagine the following: You have a website which sends you an email, each time a visitor fills out your contact form. Typically this kind of emails contains valuable information which you want to have in an easy to handle format. After some initial configuration, an email parser will be able to automatically go through all your emails (old and new) and extract the essential data fields.
There are a couple of solutions on the market which can get pretty expensive. The app which we cover in this article ( mailparser.io ) is however quite affordable and their pricing starts at $25, for 400 emails/month. There is also a free trial account available.
The app strives to make the setup as easy and fast as possible. In most cases, you’ll have a reliable email parsing solution within a couple of minutes. Let’s have a quick look at their introduction video to understand how this works:
Convert Emails to Excel in Three Easy Steps
Let’s keep in mind that our goal is to save time by eliminating tedious manual data entry. Instead of doing a manual copy & paste routine, our goal is to have a fully automated system which will transform our emails to spreadsheets .
So how do we built a system like this? The basic steps after creating a free 30day Trial are:
- Create a private inbox to which you’ll forward your emails
- Create custom tailored parsing rules which fit your emails
- Download the parsed data as an Excel File
Configure Your Own Email Parser
To be fully transparent, step 1 and 3 are quite trivial. The magic is happening in step 2 where you’ll tell the parsing algorithm of the email parser which data you want to extract.
Fortunately, Mailparser offers some easy to use tools which make this process quite easy. By using their click & point editor it is possible to build complex parsing rules without the need of coding. In addition to a screencast on how to build custom parsing rules you’ll also find plenty of information in their knowledge base.
Build custom Email Parsing rules without Coding in minutes
As you can see in the video shown above, the app is able to create the parsing rules all by itself in most cases. You’ll then only need to adjust them a bit or add additional ones.
From now on, each time you forward a new email to your new @mailparser.io inbox address it will be processed immediately according to your parsing rules.
Download Email Data to Excel
Once your parsing rules are ready and the email parsing works reliable for all your email samples, it’s time to download your data as a Spreadsheet File. All you need to do is to create a new download link which will return a spreadsheet containing all parsed data.
By default, the parsing results of the last 100 emails are included in this file, you can change the configuration however to things like “Include emails received today”, “All emails received this week” etc. This can be pretty handy if you want to download the newest parsed data on a daily basis for instance.
Alright, that’s it! We now have a fully automated system which will convert emails to Excel files.
From now on, all we need to do is to forward our emails to our private @mailparser.io address (which can also be automated with forwarding filters) and one minute later we’ll be able to download the parsed data as a Spreadsheet. Very handy and time saving!