FAQ

+-What are email parsing rules?
A Parsing Rule is a collection of simple instructions which tell our algorithm what kind of data you want to pull out from your emails. Typically you’ll create multiple parsing rules, one for each data field inside your email (e.g. customer name, company etc.).
+-How many parsing rules do I need to create?
One parsing rule is responsible for extracting one data field from your email (customer name, an email address,…). This means that you will typically create as many parsing rules, as fields you want to extract from your emails. There is no limit on how many parsing rules you can create, a typical number would be between five and ten for each configuration.
+-How do I set up an email parsing rule?
A basic parsing rule would be one which extracts a data value which can be found inside the body of the email. Ideally this value has a preceding label which stays the same in all emails (e.g. “First Name:”, “Email:”, “Shipping Address:”, …).
Below are the high level steps in creating parsing rule
1. Select the CRM field (eg Lead.Company)
2. Select a data source (e.g. email body, email subject)
3. Add a Start position text-filter which defines the start of your variable (e.g. search for “Company: “)
4. Add a End position text-filter which defines the end of your variable (e.g. “end of line”)
5. Refine the result with additional settings like trim, remove empty lines, extract first name, extract last name, etc
+-How can I split up a full name into first and last name?
When parsing leads from e-mails you’ll mostly stumble on “Full Names”, meaning one line which represents the given and family name of a lead. However CRM has seperate fields for first name and last name.
When creating parsing rule, we have provided an option under text refinement section called as “Extract First Name” and “Extract Last Name”. The rule works as following: Extract the word before space as the “First Name” and after as the “Last Name”.
+-Is there a way to avoid creating duplicate records?
Yes, we have provided a setting under exclusion section called as “Exclude already processed”.
Whenever an email is processed, we can set the regarding of the email to the newly created record. So, if the above setting is marked as true then only those emails will be processed where regarding has not been set.
+-Can we set default values for cretain fields in the newly created record?
Yes, to set up default values…select data source as “Default Values” and then enter the text accordingly.
For example, if you wanted to set a default value for “lead source” for the newly created leads…then you would create a parsing rule for field Lead.Lead Source and enter value as “Web” or “Other”
+-How long should it take for data to be extracted from my email to create CRM record? Also when does email parser trigger?
Once email parser configuration has been created then the record is created almost instantly when an email is received in CRM.
Email parser triggers for all incoming emails in CRM having ‘received’ status.
+-I have created the parsing rules but no records are getting created in CRM. How do i troubleshoot?

Email parser triggers instantly when an email is received in CRM. So first step would be to verify if the email has been received. You can check the emails under the particular queue that has been configured.Eg. all the emails received in CRM support queue would be visible under the queue (browse to Settings >> Business Management >> Queues and open ‘Support Queue’. The received email should be visible in the ‘queue items’.

If the email shows up in the queue then next step would be to check the event log. The name of the event log record is populated with email subject (as long as the license is valid). Open the log to check if an error occured when parsing a particular email.

We have now added a new feature called as “Test Run”. The classic approach to test “email parser” is to send an email to the queue (which has been configured for email parser). The test email is received in the mailbox and then pulled in to CRM using server side synchronization. This process takes lot of time.
Hence to speed up the testing, use the “Test Run” feature. On click of “Test Email” button, we artifically generate an email within CRM…which is received by this support queue and then parsed based on the parsing rules. (refer KB article “Getting Started – Email Parser Setup for more details)

+-Can incoming emails be filtered based on keywords?
Yes, EP configuration has a setting called as ‘Subject Filter’ under Inclusion section.
Here you can add multiple keywords seperated by “;”. If this filter has been specified then email subject having any of these matching keywords would be processed and rest will be ignored. If no values have been specified then no filteration will be applied.

eg. keyword: @case
Only emails having subject “@case” will be processed for that particular configuration.

This allows you to have same queue but multiple conigurations…eg. you could setup a support queue and 2 different configuartion records… one for creating leads and other one for creating cases. In the lead configuration…the keyword could be @lead and in case configuration… the keyword could be @case.