Generative Data Intelligence

A Comprehensive Guide to Email Parsers

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Over eighty percent of small and medium-sized firms use email marketing to attract new customers and keep the ones they already have.

Email is an essential component of modern business operations. Emails often contain customer contact information, customer order confirmations, vendor payment requests, lead requests and similar crucial business data.

Email parsers can help organizations extract and leverage all the data trapped in their emails and attachments.


Are you still manually entering email data into your CRM, ERP or spreadsheet? Automate email parsing workflows with Nanonets.


What is an Email Parser?

An email parser or email extractor is a tool used to harvest information from incoming emails. Data can be extracted from the header and email content by using a mail parsing API. In addition, it can extract data directly from email attachments such as PDF files, CSV files, images, and other document types.

Email parsing software can be programmed to extract particular data fields from new messages. The user can turn unstructured email data into structured data that is convenient to feed into CRM or ERP software. Email parsing thus eliminates unnecessary manual data entry.

Is Email Parsing like Web Scraping?

Email parsing is similar to web scraping. While web scrapers generally collect data from HTML websites, email parsers only extract data from email headers, bodies and attachments.

Email parsing software searches for particular phrases and keywords within an email.

Email parsers can directly retrieve emails for your inbox. Alternatively, they also provide a dedicated email id to which all your emails can auto-forwarded.

The email parsing tool will then automatically recognise and extract data fields from emails, based on the parsing rules set up by the user. Most email parsers allow users to set up custom parsing rules, in a simple no-code UI.

Why is Email Parsing Important?

The best email parsing software help improve productivity for companies that receive and analyze emails daily. Employees can focus on higher value tasks now. Instead of scouring through multiple emails to extract little bits of information one at a time.

Automated email parsing is much more accurate than manual data entry and can be used to set up workflows. For example, parsing rules can be set up for highlighting data fields with low parsing confidence – which can be sent for manual review.

Email parsing can thus eliminate manual data entry and ensure minimal manual review.

Email Parsing Benefits

Parsing emails offer significant benefits to businesses of any size and sector. Here are some of them:

Saving Time and Money

As mentioned above, email parsers can eliminate a lot of wasteful manual work. This helps staff focus on other high value tasks which can directly impact the company’s bottom line.

Email parsing can also reduce delays by ensuring that data is sent almost immediately to downstream business applications.

Automating Workflows

Email parsers automatically pick up data fields of interest from emails. The extracted data can then be modified into any preferred format. And finally the data can be imported into any downstream software such as CRM, ERPs or accounting software.

This entire process can be set up as a zero-touch automated workflow.

Improving Quality of Work

When less effort is dedicated to manual operations, data entry errors reduce dramatically. Imagine going through hundreds of emails to extract information – that’s just a lot of data to manage manually!

Accuracy is assured when using an email parser to automate data extraction. Email parsing can be easily scaled without compromising on the quality and accuracy of data extraction.


Are you still manually entering email data into your CRM, ERP or spreadsheet? Automate email parsing workflows with Nanonets.


Practically any email can be parsed to extract valuable data. Business documents & transaction updates are often sent via email and contain important data.

Here are some popular email parsing use cases:

Purchase requisitions, purchase orders, invoices, bank statements and other documents are often emailed as attachments. With email parsers you can automatically classify/categorize each email or attachment and send it to an appropriate parser for further processing.

Imagine receiving a PO via email and automatically invoicing the customer! Or automatically extracting data from attached payment receipts and feeding into your accounting software.

Lead management and enrichment

Businesses often have prospects reach out to them via email. These emails contain the lead’s contact info and other information relevant to sales and marketing teams. An email parser can automatically extract lead information and update the data in a CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot.

Marketing teams can then target these leads with relevant outreach. Or sales teams can further qualify such leads by sending a quote or jumping on a call.

E-commerce process automation

Every e-commerce purchase triggers a series of emails containing order information, invoices and updates.

Email parsing APIs can help ecommerce sites optimize order fulfillment, shipment and customer follow ups.

Food delivery emails

Since there is no public food delivery API, you can build a custom food delivery API by extracting data from food delivery emails.


Are you still manually entering email data into your CRM, ERP or spreadsheet? Automate email parsing workflows with Nanonets.


How to Automate Email Parsing with Nanonets

Here are the steps to set up an automated email parsing workflow with Nanonets:

Create an account

Sign up to get started with Nanonets.

Build a custom email parser

Upload a few sample files and mark the fields that you wish to extract. The AI will learn to identify your fields of interest based on the examples you show – the more the better.

Screenshots of emails will do just fine. Test the custom extractor with new files to see how it works.

Note that Nanonets offers out of the box extractors for common document types that might come in as attachments including invoices, POs, receipts and more.

Define the source(s)

If emails are your primary source, then set up a Nanonets receiving address and auto-forward all relevant emails to that email id.

You can also set up an automatic import of files from cloud storage, databases or connect via an API.

Set up the workflow

Create the entire workflow by connecting the source to the custom data extractor you built. You can also define parsing rules to process the extracted data into an appropriate output format.

Finally define the destination that you would like to export the refined data into. You can export the data directly into CRM or ERP software via Nanonets’ API.

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