Microsoft Flow – Get your data out of email using Parseur

Have you ever tried to integrate with an application that doesn’t offer you any API?

Maybe not the first option for integrations,but have you ever wanted to get information out of emails that you receive form applications? Imagine that you need to integrate with an application that you don’t own.

In this post I’m going to show you how you can do this. I’m going to sue the Flow community site as an example. I have no way of getting to the Flow Community Form database. Also I’m not aware of any API, but I am getting these alerts every time someone posts an update to an issue that I have participated in.

These emails look a bit like this:

Before I go any further. The same system that I’m describing could of course look at any other emails. Imagine if you wanted to integrate with Amazon and every time you order something you could take some actions. Or for example you could scan your invoices that arrive by email and then make the payment after approval. There are plenty of potential solutions available. I’m happy to help you implement these if you are interested. This is a bit similar to my invoice handling post a few weeks ago.

Since last week Microsoft Flow has a received new connector that lets you scan through emails. Parseur comes with its own mailbox where you can send email to.

So you could even get a flow to forward email to the Parseur mailbox if that is needed.

Now all you need is a flow that triggers when Parseur has processed an email and you are ready to use the data form your emails.

Within the Parseur app you can create multiple email templates so that you can process multiple formats. Imagine the Invoice example. Suppliers all use different format invoices and now you can process them all when they arrive as email using Parseur or you could use DocParser if you receive PDFs and you need to OCR the documents.

One small improvement I would like to see though. There are two important Parseur triggers in Flow.

Document faileds to process and New document processed. This is assuming that you would have different flows for failed and successfully processed emails. I would be happy to make that all a single trigger so that my flow can handle the errors all within a single flow. Having said that for a first release I do like the Parseur connector and I can see a lot of potential in the future.