Is there a way to automatically extract information from emails (e.g. regex prices on gmail)?

Question

Every month I get an email from my mobile carrier which tells me how much money my contract has cost me the last month, and I'd like to be able to form that into an iOS notification with IFTTT. The problem is that I can't just create a new recipe with the mail body as a title, because the exact cost is not in the first lines for the mail.

An example for a mail I get would be

Hello nO_OnE_910,
[text]
cost: 10.00 €
[text]

And I'd like to get the information 10.00 € from that, with a regex like 'cost:\s(\d+\.\d{2})\s' and then send an email with the content of the first group to IFTTT to process the data.

Is this possible in any way without having to have a device on my end running?

Answer 1

I was just looking for a similar feature in IFTTT, but then discovered that Zapier (kind of) supports this. They're not proper regex's but it does pattern matching of sorts

https://parser.zapier.com

Might be good enough for what you need!

Answer 2

The short answer is: no, you can't do this.

The long answer:

• IFTTT does not have a regular expression scraper, at least as of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/grmeyer/status/240888420677873664

• IFTTT does not legitimately let you create your own THIS conditions or THAT actions.

• Illegitimately, you can use https://github.com/captn3m0/ifttt-webhook to create your own THAT actions. You would still need a server on the Internet or you could try using a free service.

• The flow of action would then be:

  • IFTTT receives a copy of the billing email (either by checking your gmail, or by you auto-fowarding them your copy).

  • IFTTT sends the email to your application.

  • Your application filters out the regex, and sends email to IFTTT.

  • IFTTT parses this new email and turns it into an SMS.

"The technology involved in getting this to work is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it's simpler just to look at the email yourself"

Also consider looking into pipes.yahoo.com