From Email to Database
An Obindo customer recently approached us and asked: could Obindo be used to parse email messages, extract a set of contacts, and store those contacts into a simple database?
Our first response was, naturally, to suggest they use our email to salesforce integration. But they weren't using Salesforce and, anyway, they were hoping for something even simpler.
And, come to think of it, so were we. Salesforce is an amazingly powerful tool for a lot of things, but sometimes it just feels right to build something that is as lightweight as possible.
So, first question: if the goal is to create a lightweight app that provides email to database functionality, what database should we use? Well, after some thought, the answer wasn't too hard to discover: we'd simply send data into a spreadsheet with Google Docs.
Next question: what information should we pull out? In keeping with the spirit of the project, we thought we would focus on only parsing email headers, looking for names and email addresses in the to, cc, and bcc line.
A bit of work, and: viola. We've got it. You can now send Obindo any email, and we'll pull out the appropriate contacts and create a simple, two-column file with the name and email address we find in the email. Just like this:
And that's all there is to it!
Is this a sophisticated inbound email integration workflow that you use to route information from department to department throughout your organization, connecting to your CRM and marketing automation apps? Nope: this is a simple, straightforward tool that extracts just the information you need and creates a simple contact database for you on-the-fly.
While we created Obindo so that you can create sophisticated inbound email processing workflows, we also like to check ourselves from time-to-time just to make sure that we can also keep things simple.
We think this is a useful little tool. If you have a suggestion for another simple email to database tool that would make your life easier, give us a shout.