This tutorial assumes that you already created a mailbox and sent your first email. If you haven't done either, check out this article to get started.
This article is about the template parsing system, which is a deprecated version of our software - in almost all cases we recommend using the AI engine to extract data from your emails. We have a walk through available on this here.
Prefer to watch a video?
Step 1: Open the template editor
There are two ways to create a new email template:
Hovering over an email and clicking on + New template on the Documents page:
Clicking on the + icon on the quick actions menu on the top right corner of the screen:
Step 2: Get acquainted with the template editor
When you create your first template, the Template Editor tutorial opens. You can revisit that tutorial by clicking on the "How to use this editor" link at the top right corner of the screen.
The Template Editor is where you will show which information you want to retrieve from documents.
Let's go through each section of this screen:
Template Name: Give your template a name (name must be unique in a mailbox)
View As: Leave this on Rich for now. Other modes can be useful but are for an advanced usage.
Email body: This is a render of the email you've uploaded. You'll click and drag on elements to create fields and tables.
Fields tab: lists the fields currently captured from the document for this template. As you haven't created any field yet, this list is also empty.
New Field: Click and drag over a piece of non-repeating text in the email body (3) to enable this button, which will save the value as a new field. See Step 3 below.
New Table: Click and drag over a table in the email body (3) to enable this button, which will save what was selected as a new table. More information is available here.
Metadata tab: Capture metadata not inside of the email body in this tab. More information is available here.
Static tab: Define specific output to always return when emails are processed. More information is available here.
Settings:
Date formatting: Use this to change the date formatting of fields using date output formatting.
Decimal separator: Use this to change the decimal separator for numbers between a comma and a period.
Action on matching documents: leave this on Process. Skip and Delete can be used when you want to discard emails from being processed.
After save: When finished with editing your template, you can choose to reprocess all documents, reprocess unprocessed documents, or do nothing.
Help & Tutorial: Access our knowledge base here.
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Step 3: Create your first field
In Parseur, a field represents a piece of information you want to extract.
The animation below shows you how to add your first field:
To add a field:
Select the piece of text you want to capture
The New Field button becomes available
Click this button, this will add a new entry to the Used fields section
Name your field
Click the ✓ icon (or press Enter)
Step 4: Create all remaining fields and save
Repeat the steps described above for every field you want to capture.
Step 5: Add Metadata fields (optional)
You may want to extract additional metadata information that is not present in the document body, like for instance the Sender's email address, the date the email was sent to, etc.
Head over to the Metadata tab next to the Fields tab:
For more information check out our Using Metadata Fields article.
Step 6: Save the template
Once finished, click Create.
You will now see that your document has been processed.
For each document, you can perform 8 actions on hover:
View: display the email and the parsed data
Re-run parsing: useful if you updated the template and want to refresh the captured data
Create a new template based on the document
Skip document: Parseur will now ignore it
Copy document to another mailbox
View the logs to see an audit trail of what happened to the document (new! not shown on the screen capture)
Launch the template debugger to see which parts of the document match or not a template
Delete the document
Step 7: Check the results
Make sure that all the data were captured correctly.
On this screen you see:
At the top, metadata info about the document, including the number of credits that were used
At the top right, the action buttons (hover them for more information)
On the left, the email
On the right, the parsed data extracted (based on the template indicated at the top)
If everything looks correct, congratulations! You have parsed your first email.
Now send more emails and verify that your data is correctly extracted. Create new templates as necessary.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I add an email sample to an existing template?
This feature is only available for OCR (PDFs) documents, unfortunately. For emails, you can use the debugger to see which part of the email didn't match the template and then either adjust the template manually or create a new template.