We tested dozens of email parsers to find the best one for your business. Here are our top five picks for 2023. Read on to learn which are the best tools to automate data extraction from emails and attachments!
Having an overloaded mailbox full of emails and attachments is never fun. It takes a lot of work and time to manually go through your inbox on a daily basis and achieve inbox zero. Let's say, for example, that you are in the real estate business. You surely receive dozens of leads via email from different platforms and third-party sites every day. Or if you are in e-commerce, all order confirmations likely come into your mailbox as well. The same goes for someone who is in the food delivery sector. For all those use cases, you want to extract specific information from incoming emails and send it to Google Sheets, a CRM tool, or any other application.
It's a rather simple manual data entry process, but a time-consuming one, especially if your business is growing and you are receiving many emails.
This is where an email parsing tool comes in handy!
What is an email parser?
An email parser is a tool that allows you to automatically extract data from emails and attachments. You can then export the parsed data to other business applications. With an email parser, you can save countless hours of manual processing, be cost-efficient, and scale your business up in no time.
Why use an email parser?
Email parsing tools do so much more than just data extraction. We have summarized the top benefits of using an email parser for your business below:
Extract data from Outlook and Gmail easily
Email parsers are generally compatible with every email provider. Thus, emails received from Outlook, Exchange, Gmail, or Yahoo can be extracted quickly.
Some email parser tools can only work with text-based emails but the most advanced ones can directly work with content-rich emails and even parse their attachments.
Save time and money
No matter which industry you are in, an email parsing software will be able to extract specific data automatically. This can be done via templates or parsing rules, depending on which email parser tool you are using.
Automating text extraction from emails will save you countless hours of manual data entry which will turn into huge cost savings. It will also absorb peaks of activity without overworking your team or requiring you to hire temps during peaks.
No need to be tech-savvy anymore
In the past, using or creating an email parser required you to have strong coding skills. You had to deal with setting up an IMAP server, decoding multipart MIME emails, and crafting regular expressions to extract patterns from content.
Those days are long gone. Nowadays, email parsers are here to easily replace your manual data entry. The best email parsers are point-and-click and can be used by anybody. They make it easy to set up a data extraction workflow for a new type of email in minutes!
Connect your email data to your business applications
A good email parser will integrate seamlessly with all your business applications. Extracted email data can be sent automatically and instantly. No need to have somebody watching your shared business mailbox and copy and paste every incoming request into your system.
Let the robots do the boring work!
The 5 best email parsers
Of course, you can still create your own email parser from scratch. But believe us when we say that it will be a huge time sink. Email parsing is a commodity nowadays, and you have plenty of powerful and affordable parsing solutions to choose from.
Here are our top 5 picks for 2023:
- Parseur: best overall for ease-of-use and heavy-duty parsing
- Zapier email parser: best for low-volume, casual use
- Email parser: best Windows desktop application
- Mailparser: best for rule-based parsing
- SigParser: best to extract email signatures
Top email parser software for 2023
Parseur for heavy-duty email processing automation
The visual template editor lets you quickly highlight the fields to capture in a sample email
Parseur is our very own tool, so of course, we are very proud of its capabilities! That being said, we always try to be as objective as can be when assessing its capabilities against the other tools out there. And if you notice something that we missed or got wrong, please let us know!
Parseur is a no-code email parsing tool that extracts data from emails, and other documents. What makes Parseur unique is that it provides supports automatic layout detection. That is, if you receive emails from various sources with different layouts, there is no need to create separate mailboxes for different emails. Just create a template to teach Parseur what field to extract from each email layout. Then, Parseur automatically picks up the right template whenever a new email is forwarded to the mailbox.
Parseur also has a powerful OCR engine to extract text and tables from PDFs using Zonal OCR and Dynamic OCR.
What does Parseur do well?
Parseur was launched in 2016 and has the following top-notch features for email processing automation:
- Parse emails and email attachment formats such as PDF, Excel, CSV, HTML, Word, and RTF.
- Tell Parseur which data to extract using our visual point-and-click template editor. No need to create complex parsing rules.
- Use field formats to normalize names, numbers, dates, times, and geolocate addresses.
- Extract tables and repetitive data in a few clicks.
- Send extracted data instantly to thousands of applications, including Zapier, Make, and Power automate connections.
Parseur also provides a built-in library of ready-made templates for different industries such as real estate, food ordering, Google Alerts, and job search.
And, to top it all, Parseur is built for heavy-duty parsing, capable of parsing tens of thousands of documents per minute.
Parseur's pricing is very affordable when compared to the cost of doing manual data entry. And it also comes with a free plan with all the features available!
Zapier email parser for simple parsing requirements
Zapier also comes with a point and click editor, it only supports text emails and does not support attachments.
Zapier Parser works perfectly for those who want to dip their toes in email parsing for the first time. It is free, easy-to-use and set up, and you can create unlimited mailboxes.
If you want to use Zapier integrations, then its email parser is great to combine with. Zapier integrates with over thousands of applications to which you can send data. All you have to do is set up your trigger and action in the “Zap”.
If you have simple processes to automate, then Zapier Email Parser does a great job.
However, for more complex document parsing workflows, for example requiring table parsing, attachment parsing, or multi-layout support, the tool may not be your best choice.
Email Parser for Windows users
Email Parser is a desktop mail parsing application for windows
Email parser is a Windows standalone application and works well for those who want to keep all their data locally or connect to applications on their local network. It can connect to any email provider so that you can forward your emails to the mailbox and it can parse data from any documents as well. The Windows app comes with a yearly subscription package that starts at $145/year.
The email parsing tool uses parsing rules to work, which can sometimes be a bit complex to manage and maintain. If you want the software to run continuously, you will also need to leave a computer always on in your office with the tool running on it.
Mailparser for parsing rules
Mailparser uses individual parsing rules to extract text from emails
Mailparser is one of the oldest email parsers that boasts advanced features, just like Parseur. The email parsing tool is rule-based, which means that you need to create a rule for every field you want to extract in an email.
Creating rules can take time to set up, especially if you do not have a technical background. But once the rules are set up, it will parse the emails and documents automatically and reliably. Attachment parsing, metadata parsing, and table parsing can all be done using rules.
Mailparser does not provide the automatic layout detection feature, which means that you have to create a new mailbox for each email layout and manually route those emails to the right mailbox.
Overall, Mailparser is a powerful parser but could be a little complex to manage for those who are not tech-savvy.
SigParser for parsing email signatures
SigParser specializes in extracting contact details from email signatures
SigParser is focused on extracting contact details from email signatures and it does a great job with it! Most email signatures contain contact information of your leads or clients and they come in different formats and styles. Manually extracting those and putting them into a CRM software is tedious. SigParser does the job for you by identifying the name, address, phone number, and updating the contact details in any CRM tool.
With its free version, it can extract contact details from the last 90 days of 3 mailboxes.
If all that you want to do is scrape email signatures, then SigParser is the one for you.
In a nutshell, best email parser comparison table
We summarize the main features of the email parsing tools in the table below.
| Parseur | Mailparser | Zapier email parser | Email parser | SigParser | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Templates | Rules | Templates | Rules | Auto |
| Automatic parsing | Yes, many | Yes, some | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-layout support | Yes, auto | Yes, manual | No | No | N/A |
| Table parsing | Yes, Point & Click | Yes, via rules | No | No | N/A |
| Metadata parsing | Yes | Yes | No | No | N/A |
| Post-processing | Yes | Yes | Via multi-step zap | No | No |
| Cloud-based | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| API | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| PDF parsing | Yes, OCR | Yes, text only | No | No | NA |
| Attachment parsing | Yes, many formats | Only Word and PDF | No | No | No |
Wrapping up
We hope this helped you pick the right parsing tool for the job! Every email parsing application offers different features and benefits. It will depend on which industry you are in and how you want to integrate an email parsing tool in your business. However, without any doubt, using an email parser will help you save countless hours of manual work and scale up your business.
You may also want to read our 2023 best PDF parsing tool comparison.
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