Hi! It’s Deb from the Zapier blog, here to talk about how I overcame my severe parserphobia (fear of using email parsing tools). I was a little skeptical about robots reading my emails, but the real fear was just that I would spend hours trying to set it up only for it not to work. That’s hours I could have spent watching back episodes of Survivor (or working or whatever).

Anyway, I finally decided to try it. And without going into detail about how many times I swore at the computer, I set up an automation to pull invoicing details from my email into the spreadsheet where I monitor my budget—and I did it in 15 minutes. 15 minutes! Over the past week-ish since I made the Zap, I’ve absolutely already saved at least that much time not having to open multiple documents and copy and paste and all that jazz.

So here I am telling you: try an email parser. It won’t bite.

Our staff writer Justin did loads of research and put together a list of the best email parsers. Yes, Email Parser by Zapier made the cut, but most of the rest of them integrate with Zapier too. 

The 5 best email parser apps in 2021

If you go with Zapier’s option, take a look at our guide to email parsing.

What’s a tool you were afraid of and then finally tried? Did all your darkest fears come true, or did you have more of a Deb-does-email-parsing kind of ending? Let me know in the comments!