OpenHelm Mail · Inbound
Turn the email you receive into data
Define the fields you care about. Every message that arrives is labelled and extracted against them, so what was a mailbox becomes a table you can query.
The situation.
A great deal of business still arrives as email: invoices, purchase orders, booking requests, applications, supplier quotes. Somebody reads each one and types the same six fields into another system.
How it works.
Your schema, per inbox
Describe the fields you want as a schema on the inbox. Different addresses can extract different things, so invoices@ and applications@ do not have to agree.
Labels you define
Alongside extraction, each message can be labelled against categories you write in plain language, so the routing you already do in your head becomes a column.
A failure is empty, never guessed
If extraction fails, the fields come back null. There is no keyword fallback pretending to be a result, because a wrong invoice number is worse than a missing one.
Attachments included
Most of this arrives attached rather than typed. The files are stored and available to the agent that processes the message.
Then do something with it
Extraction is one step of a job. The same run can write the row, reply to the sender, and hand the exception to a person.
What you actually do. Once.
Point an address at it
A new inbox on your domain, or a forwarding route from an address you already publish.
Describe the fields
The schema you want extracted, and the labels you want applied. Both live on the inbox and can change without touching a job.
Handle the exceptions
Decide what happens when a field comes back empty. Usually that is a person, and the point is that you can see which ones they are.
Questions
What if the model gets a field wrong?
It can, which is why the extraction is stored next to the original message rather than replacing it. You can always see what arrived.
What if it cannot extract anything?
The fields are null and the message is still stored and still visible. Absence is recorded as absence rather than filled in with a plausible value.
Does this work on attachments?
The files are stored and available to a job, which can open them and work from the contents.
Give your agents a real email address.
Inboxes on your own domain, replies that wake the agent handling them, and a person in the loop wherever you want one.