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Ask HN: How to parse emails like TripIt?

by paulsingh on 10/25/10, 11:24 PM with 2 comments

Does TripIt write custom parsers for each potential email source (Expedia, Orbits, United.com, etc)? Or are they using some sort of parsing library that I'm not aware of?

I run a small CRM system for notary publics (notarycrm.com) and customers are consistently requesting the capability to forward scheduling emails (from banks/signing companies) into NotaryCRM. The idea would be that we'd parse the emails and add the signing to the customer's account - saving them a few minutes for each signing.

UPDATE: If anyone is particularly interested in helping me parse emails via SendGrid's Parse API, contact me - will trade your RRuby on Rails skillz for money. :)

  • by Travis on 10/26/10, 12:19 AM

    Most likely they wrote their own parsing library. I'm not aware of any out there, but it's pretty trivial to write code that will login to an IMAP system and parse messages.

  • by ashleyreddy on 10/26/10, 2:53 AM

    I wrote one for my startup paperhater.com Just using regexp.