Parseur Review. Service for parsing mail and documents
When your work is focused on processing hundreds of letters or documents, sooner or later the thought comes to mind to automate this process. In this case, various parsing tools come to the rescue, that is, to extract data from letters and documents.
Parseur is an online service for automatically processing and extracting data from emails and documents in real time.
How it works
Immediately after registration in the service, you will be prompted to create a so-called mailbox. All data for parsing will be collected in it.
At the first stage, one box is needed, but during further work, you can create several boxes for different processing parameters.
Then you need to select the type of data that will fall into the created box. The processing template that will be used for further configuration and work depends on the choice.
You can choose from custom templates for mail and attachments. Plus, almost ready-to-use templates for handling food orders, resumes, Google Alerts and more.
For the overview, I chose the template for handling mail and attachments. Parseur at the entrance supports almost any type of documents (abw, csv, djvu, doc, docm, docx, html, htm, lwp, md, odt, pages, pages.zip, pdf, rst, rtf, sdw, tex, txt, wpd , wps, xls, xlsx, xlsm, zabw) and any mail providers. Data can be sent not only through mail and supported services (Grubhub, LinkedIn, etc.), but also through Zapier, Microsoft Flow, or using an open API.
In my case, to feed the data to Parseur, the mailing address of the service was issued, to which the first email had to be sent to complete the setup.
Thanks to this, by the way, you can configure the automation of mail processing. To do this, you just need to configure the appropriate filters in your mail client.
When the email is received, you need to customize the processing template. To do this, a preview of the received letter opens, where you need to select which fields you need to process.
To do this, you just need to select them in the letter itself and indicate the necessary actions on it: process, skip, delete, or process and delete.
After you specify actions for all required fields, Parseur will be able to create lists with information from these fields.
The same steps should be taken for attachments from a letter. And the parsing result can be saved as an xlsx, csv or json table.
When everything is set up, all letters coming to the created mailbox will be automatically processed according to the configured rules, and you can get the result in a format convenient for you. There is also support for a couple of dozen third-party tools and services, where Parseur can automatically send the processing result.
To process a different format of data or letters, you need to create a new mailbox and repeat the whole process again. If you do not want to create a new box, you can create a new processing template if the format of the input data fields is different.
Pricing
Parseur has a free plan that blocks the ability to post-process data using Python scripts. And also you can process no more than 20 documents per month.
Paid plans start at $ 59 per month and increase the number of documents processed per month. You can unlock data post-processing only on the Pro plan for $ 299 per month.
When I was preparing to write a review on Parseur, I was expecting some kind of complex interface and a long understanding of the work process. In practice, it turned out that working with the service is very easy, and in just five minutes, the templates are set up fully automatically.
Of course, depending on the number of fields to parse, setting up a template can take several minutes or several days. But the service itself will not slow you down, but only help.