This April, we launched our Inbound Parsing Service, an incoming email processing capability, as part of our SocketLabs On-Demand SMTP service. Up until that time, our SMTP relay service was for outbound email traffic only. The new Inbound Parsing Service provides companies looking to integrate both outbound email delivery and tracking with the ability to capture inbound email messages for storage and display within their own applications. Parsing refers to the process of SocketLabs’ servers receive an incoming email message and breaking down that message into its individual components that can be more easily consumed by applications (i.e. headers, message body, attachments). The Inbound Parsing Service provides these companies with an easy way to get inbound email messages programmatically via an HTTP POST message to a specified HTTP endpoint. Programmers can parse the attached JSON data structure for each of the email parts and store it accordingly.
Why would you use an Inbound Parsing Service? What applications or industries would benefit from such a feature? In this article we will discuss 3 application types that we believe would benefit highly from our Inbound Parsing Service.
1. Customer Support/Customer Service Applications
Most modern customer support applications capture customer interactions in a message stream using email as the primary delivery mechanism for these messages. The Incoming Email Service provides a perfect solution for application service providers in this industry by providing a fully hosted, ready-to-use system for capturing and parsing the inbound messages from customers for storage and display within support applications. SocketLabs removes the need for investment and maintenance of costly email infrastructure and also the development of a compliant email parsing engine.
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Applications
Sales or CRM applications often record email interactions with customers to provide valuable customer history data. By routing customer responses through the Inbound Parsing Service, CRM applications can receive pre-parsed email messages as a JSON data structure through a simple HTTP POST message. It is a clean, painless, more cost-effective way of supporting email within your application.
3. Social Applications
Social applications that provide either personal or group interactions via email can get great results from the Inbound Parsing Service. Often social media applications enable conversations via email and then you can follow this conversation online through the web. The Incoming Email Service is an easy and fast way for social application developers to enable their email applications in a way that scales. As social interaction grows, the incoming email service grows with you without concern for the infrastructure to support it.
These are only a few examples of how the Inbound Parsing Service can help provide an out-of-the-box solution for application developers and solution architects looking to build inbound email capabilities into their applications. SocketLabs Inbound Parsing Service provides an effective, scalable, and robust managed solution for inbound email processing.
What other uses do you see for our Inbound Parsing Service? Comment below and sign up for a Free account to try it out!
