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Email from Apple Mail to Zapier email; then to Notion database; content not appearing

  • 19 May 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 109 views

Userlevel 1

I’m using Apple Mail.  Consider an email sent from someone (“Bob”) to me.  I then forward this email to my personal Zapier email address, and I use the normal template Zapier integration which should add an item to a specified database using name, subject of email, content of email, time of email, etc.  (“Create database item in Notion when new inbound email in Email by Zapier”)

First, just to note, this is a very different template from what one actually needs.  I don’t want the “From” field available to Notion to be *me*, who forwarded the email to Zapier.  I want it to be who sent the email to me *originally* (Bob).  Similarly, I really do not care what time I forwarded it to Zapier.  I want to know the time Bob’s email came to me *originally*.  In any event, those are slightly challenging things to scrape for, so we’re stuck with what we have.

Which I can’t get to work.  When I forward an email to Zapier, I can get the absolute bare-bones basics to work.  It can add a task.  But when I try to put the content of the email into a Notion database text field, nothing is added.  That is, using Stripped Text, etc. or any option, either I get a bunch of html junk (where the junk far exceeds the 2000 character limit before I get to any content), or the content does not appear.  Even if I convert the outgoing forwarded mail to Plain Text (ctrl-shift-T), nothing shows up.  This is because the “Stripped Text” part treats the forwarded part of the email as something to be stripped.  If I type in “blah blah” before the forwarded text, then that does indeed show up in the text field of the Notion database.  But nothing at or after “Forwarded message from:”.

This has been quite frustrating.  I suspect this is a function of Zapier not being very careful with its fields and Apple Mail being pretty sloppy in describing them.  Are there any suggestions?  Thanks.

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Best answer by ken.a 19 May 2023, 08:01

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Userlevel 7
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Hi there @SparkleSun,

Welcome to the Community! 🎉

I totally get where you're coming from, and I understand your frustration.

Before we delve deeper into the issue, have you considered using Email Parser for your workflow? Email Parser enables you to extract data from incoming emails effortlessly.

You can find more information about Email Parser and its capabilities here:

I hope this suggestion guides you in the right direction! If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, feel free to ask. 😊

Userlevel 1

Many, many thanks for the brisk and bright answer!  I will look at Email Parser asap.

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