INTRO. Using the FileMonitorTrigger in combination with Thunderbird to start jobs according to emails received based on subject, email, email body etc.
When you are receiving quite a lot of emails per day or even per hour, and the lines on the screen just keep appearing and you do not have enough time to keep monitoring your incoming email to check whether an email you might need to read urgently has arrived … that’s where WinAutomation comes in handy once again!
I did not believe such an automation was possible, and that such a job could be completed successfuly until I actually saw it run on my pc and i was really amazed!
You can use this job to get the information you need from any templated email, such as an order form that contains the client’s information as well as the order details, or if you are in any position where you are receiving emails from a service and you need to confirm your details by clicking on a link in the email.
Introduction to Thunderbird
I’ll start by introducing you to Thunderbird, an email client that allows you to manage your emails and also gives you the opportunity to download both the emails and any attachments they may have to a specific system folder, using an extension of Thunderbird named “Attachment Extractor”.
Once you have installed Thunderbird, you then need to configure it. You can find full details about installing and configuring Thunderbird by following the instructions on this screen cast.
In order to avoid getting all emails downloaded you can make filters that will tag the emails on reception so that you can then let the Attachement Extractor which emails of all you would like to save to your pc so that WinAutomation can handle the information of.
We need to have set up in Thunderbird the name format we want to use for our files we will be saving to our system folder to be: #subject# - #fromemail# #count#.txt so that we are sure that the required text will be found in the file's filename.
Using Thunderbird with WinAutomation to achieve email monitoring
The step-by-step procedure described below is a result of the communication established between Thunderbird and Winautomation, in which, whenever a new email arrives which has a specific tag (AE AutoExtract), is saved within the specified download system folder (set in AutoExctract configuration).
Setting the FileMonitorTrigger in action
This system folder is being monitored, by WinAutomation through FileMonitorTrigger, which informs WinAutomation about any changes done to the folder (items added, changed, etc).
Creating our Job
Once the FileTriggerFilePath is populated (by a file that was saved within the specified system folder by Thunderbird Extractor), a series of actions will take place. These actions will actually determine which emails that have been downloaded should be used in specific jobs. Since we will be using 3 different types of email use, we will have the same set of actions for each job, using different variables according to the email's subject.
"Parse Text " - Retrieving the subject from the file's name
In order to determine the use of the mail we received we will compare the subject that the file is named after, and compare it to list of email handling we want to create. My 3 different types of email handling have the following subjects:
- CONFIRM REGISTRATION
- NEW CUSTOMER
- NEW ORDER
For each one of them, I will use the parse text action and ask it to compare these subjects to the subject of the saved email.
The text we will tell the action to parse will be the filepath of the file that triggered the job, and the text we will be looking for will be the either the subject of the email or the sender's e-mail.
"If" - Comparing Results
We will use the if condition to check whether the subject of our email (found in the saved file's name) matches the subject required by any of the jobs. If the required text is found within the filename then the variable value will be set to any number but -1. If the text is not found, then the value will remailn -1 (since we start searching at position 0, any possible options would start from 0).
"Read Text From File" - Getting the saved files' contents
Using the Read Text from File action to read the content of the email we will store its value to the %FileContents% variable. This is usefull because we can limit the number of times we need to read the file's content, since we can use the same variable and its stored value at any child job created by this parent job just by adding "ext:" at the beggining of the variable. eg. %ext:FileContents% (You can also check the Help File for more information on External Variables)
Job's Summary
For each job we want to assign to a specific type of email, we need to use:
- Parse Text action, to set the information to be found in the filepath,
- If Condition, to compare whether the subject of our file and our job are the same,
- Run Job, to run the job assigned for each specific type of email once the comparison is true.
We can repeat the same actions for each subject we want to assign a job to. As you can see below I have repeated the same actions for each one of the three email types I am looking for.
You can also check out Parts I, II and III to get a clue about how these jobs are connected one to the other.
PART I. Automating Registration Confirmation (Receiving emails from a website that requires confirmation of the user's email address, by prompting user to click on a confirmation link contained in the email to confirm details and registration)
PART II. Automating Data Entry from Email to Excel (Receiving emails from my business website where, customers sign up. Getting the customer's details from the email's body content and save the information to my customer's database which is in Excel)
PART III. Automating email replies and auto forwarding specific information from email's body to other emails (Receiving an order via email, sent from my business website order form. Sending the information found in the email's body to my Sales department to process the order, Sending email to the customer to thank him for purchasing the products)
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