EmailApproach

EmailApproach - The Email Processor for real people EmailApproach pulls data out of incoming emails and saves it to tab delimited text files on your desktop. These tab delimited text files will have the same name as the subject line you enter plus the word "output.txt" added to the end. The tab delimited text files can be imported into spreadsheet or database applications.

(Example: If your customers are sending you emails that have a subject line that begins with "Sales Question", EmailApproach will save the tab delimited text file to your desktop with the name "Sales Questionoutput.txt".)

Click the "Preferences..." button and then click on the "Forms" tab to set up the email forms your customers are sending you. Click on the "Email Account" tab to enter the account information for the mailbox EmailApproach is going to monitor.

Each Email Form will have associated data fields. These data fields will appear in a particular order in the incoming email. To enter this information, select the Email Form from the list of available forms. Then, enter the Field Name and the Field Order information and click the "Add Field" button. Repeat this for each field in the form your customers are submitting. Please be sure that you name the fields EXACTLY the same as they appear in the emails.

Be sure to use the appropriate delimiter. Most emails you receive will use the colon as a delimiter between the field name and its value but some will use an equals sign. The delimiter is what tells EmailApproach where the name of a field ends and the data begins.

(Example: If you have "Name=Mike". Then, the field name is "Name", the delimiter is "=", and the field value is "Mike". EmailApproach will use the field name and the delimiter to locate and extract the field value from the incoming emails. The same delimiter is used for all the field names on the form. That is why the delimiter appears in the Form Definition section and not the Field Definition section. You wouldn't want a different delimiter for each field as it would make it very difficult to automate the extraction the field values.)

The Field Order is used to tell EmailApproach the order in which you want the extracted data to be written to the output file. This may or may not be important when you import the data into another application or database.

(Example: If you set the Field Order for the field "Name" to 3, then you will find that any data associated with the field "Name" is written to column number 3 in the tab delimited output file generated by EmailApproach

All support files generated by EmailApproach can be found in the EmailApproach Preferences folder. To remove EmailApproach, delete the EmailApproach executable file and the EmailApproach Preferences folder.

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