Parse Gmail Messages to Extract Data from HTML

A mailbox has 1000s of email messages sent though legacy contact forms that contain data like the name, email and address of the senders. The business owner would like to parse these email messages, extract the relevant bits and save them to a Google Spreadsheet.

The script can be run in batches of 100 thread, to avoid exceeding the time limit, and the parsing rules can be written in Regular Expressions. Snippet by @Ferrari.

The code can extended to parse emails and extract other structured data from the message body including events information, order details, travel itineraries, shipping & tracking information, customer records and more.

/* Based on https://gist.github.com/Ferrari/9678772 */

function parseEmailMessages(start) {
  start = start || 0;

  var threads = GmailApp.getInboxThreads(start, 100);
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();

  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
    // Get the first email message of a threads
    var tmp,
      message = threads[i].getMessages()[0],
      subject = message.getSubject(),
      content = message.getPlainBody();

    // Get the plain text body of the email message
    // You may also use getRawContent() for parsing HTML

    // Implement Parsing rules using regular expressions
    if (content) {
      tmp = content.match(/Name:\s*([A-Za-z0-9\s]+)(\r?\n)/);
      var username = tmp && tmp[1] ? tmp[1].trim() : 'No username';

      tmp = content.match(/Email:\s*([A-Za-z0-9@.]+)/);
      var email = tmp && tmp[1] ? tmp[1].trim() : 'No email';

      tmp = content.match(/Comments:\s*([\s\S]+)/);
      var comment = tmp && tmp[1] ? tmp[1] : 'No comment';

      sheet.appendRow([username, email, subject, comment]);
    } // End if
  } // End for loop
}

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