March 29, 2009

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Open Source Idea: Email Data Parsing

I’ve noticed a trend in features lately; more startups are adding email interfaces to their services as an input option.  If you forward an email to a web service, it will parse it, structure the data, and then give you better access and analytics to your own email data.

The most classic implementation of this feature is TripIt. With TripIt, if you forward the transactional email confirmations you get from airlines, hotels, rental cars, trains, etc to plans@tripit.com, then TripIt will parse the information and give you a structured itinerary with a bunch of rich metadata and additional services for your trip planning process. In fact, when I hear people talking this emailing parsing feature in their web services, it’s often called “TripIt for (blank)” in order to quickly convey what the feature does.

But, as more companies add this feature to their services, they are all duplicating each other’s work.  Someone should create a web service to handle this exact feature.  You send it an email receipt and the service returns predefined XML containing the key data from the message. As companies change their email messages, one this one service would need to be updated their parsing implementation, instead of a bunch of startups doing the same work over again.

This idea would probably work best as a non-profit open source project. Initially it would require some passionate developers armed with regular expressions to pull together an initial corpus of templates for the most popular transactional emails. But, over time, if the service becomes popular, I suspect engineers from companies will adopt responsibility for their own organization’s transactional messages.

I would love to see this happen, but I suspect it would only happy organically, over a slow build, this is not the kind of idea you could accelerate adoption by throwing cash at the problem.

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