Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier

Re:Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier by prakster on Monday April 29, 2013 @03:47PM (#5628243)

Brian, whenever we bill the monthly subscription fee to our users for our saas app, we send them an email with their username and the amount. I get a copy of each such email in my gmail inbox. Is there a way I can use Zapier to parse the amounts into a google spreadsheet so I know the total amount billed for the day? (Currently I have to do this manually by opening each email and copying the username and amount inot a google spreadsheet).

I should have our dev build this report, but don't get me started on that rant :-)

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Re:Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier by GilbertErik on Monday April 29, 2013 @05:23PM (#5628895)

You can use something like Google Apps Script to plug data into a google spreadsheet (http://developers.google.com/apps-script/storing_data_spread...), but the big problem you're going to have, as Bryan mentioned, is getting the data out of your email.

It really would be easier if you just had the creator of the email not BCC you on the subscription fee and just had them cobble together a daily sheet for you. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, just a CSV would do nicely.

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Re:Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier by bryanh on Monday April 29, 2013 @03:56PM (#5628312)

Interesting use case!

Unfortunately we don't have that clever of a parser. We've definitely talked about it but aren't 100% sold on any sort of internal implementation.

We've thought about a "reverse template" where you would mark blocks of text as "variables" across a few examples and we'd parse it out. Not sure if that is feasible though...

Any HN'ers done this before and have ideas or tips?

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Re:Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier by gingerlime on Monday April 29, 2013 @05:28PM (#5628925)

I think postmark and mandrill (and maybe others) do inbound email processing and then fire a webhook. Maybe hooking those together via zapier could provide a solution? I haven't actually used any inbound mail processing yet (or I'm ashamed to admit, zapier), but it sounds doable.

p.s. Hey Bryan!

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Re:Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier by bryanh on Monday April 29, 2013 @07:39PM (#5629572)

We definitely support catching inbound email (https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/ and https://zapier.com/zapbook/mailgun/ comes to mind). I'm curious if there is a clever parsing solution...

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