Pulling from emails

Default attachment settings

To begin, take note of the generated email address that is unique to this specific flow. Copy the email address to your clipboard to start using this dedicated email address yourself or to share with others.

The File Type is set to CSV / TSV, though you can also receive XLS / XLSX, PDF, or JSON files.

The Delimiter is set to comma (,), but can also be adjusted to tab (\t) and semicolon (;). If needed, the default of Quote Character set to Double quote ( " " ) can be changed to single quote ( ' ' ).

Custom settings

This step contains optional Advanced settings, where you can tell Parabola to skip a certain number of rows or columns when receiving the attached file.

Auto-forwarding to a Parabola flow

To auto-forward a CSV attachment to an email outside of your domain, you may need to verify the @inbound.parabola.io email address. The below example shows how to set this up in Gmail.

Video overview

Step-by-step

1. Start by copying the email address provided in the step configuration settings to your clipboard.

2. In Gmail, head to your settings and select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab at the top of the page. Select Add a forwarding address and paste the email address into the form.

3. A new modal will pop up letting you know a confirmation code has been sent to the @inbound.parabola.io email address. Click OK.

4. Check your inbox to see a new email with the subject line Sorry we were unable to process your email attachment. The body of the email will contain a confirmation code and a verification link—both of which can verify the email address.

5. Click the link and a new window will appear. Click Confirm to start forwarding mail.

6. Once complete, a Confirmation Success! page will confirm that the @inbound.parabola.io email is verified.

7. Next, head to your settings and create a filter to target the emails you want to auto-forward. Select Create filter once complete.

8. Lastly, select Forward it to: and choose the @inbound.parabola.io email address that was recently verified.

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Auto-forwarding is now set up to trigger your flow! Please note, you will need to do this each time you create a new flow using this step.

Pull multiple file attachments

By default, Flows will run with the first valid attached file. If you want the Flow to run through multiple attached files (multiple attachments on one email), open the “Email trigger settings” modal and change the setting to “Run the Flow once per attachment:”

(Access these settings from the Pull from Email attachment step, or from the Flow trigger settings on the published Flow page.)

For emails with multiple files attached, the Flow will run once per file received, sequentially.

• Files must be of the same type (CSV, XLS, PDF, or JSON) for the runs to process.
• The file type is defined in the initial step settings (”File type” dropdown).
• Any files received that are of a different type will cause a Flow run error.

Pull subject and body

We also support the ability to pull in additional information about an email, including:

• Email Body
• Subject Line
• Sender email address
• CC'd Emails
• File Attachment Name

To access these fields, you can toggle the "Pull data from" field to pull in Email subject and body. If you'd like to pull both an attachment and the subject and body, you can use two separate steps to pull in both of these datasets.

Extract data from the body of an email with AI

Use the “Extract data with AI” option to automatically extract tables and key values from email bodies to create structured output.

Enable this option in the "Parsing settings" when pulling in the “Email content”.

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Pull a sheet from an Excel file based on file position

Use the "position is" option when pulling in an attached Excel document to specify which sheet to pull data from by its position, rather than its name. This is great for files that have key data in consistent sheet positions, but may not always have consistent sheet names.

When using this option, only the number of sheets that are in the last emailed file will show in the dropdown. If a Flow using these settings is run and there is no sheet in the specified position, the step will error.

Helpful tips

• This step will run every time the dedicated email address receives a new attached file. This is useful for triggering your flow to run automatically, outside of a dedicated schedule or webhook.
• If your XLS file has multiple sheets, this step auto-selects the first sheet but can be set to look for a specific sheet.
• This step can handle attached files that are up to 5MB.
• Each run of a Flow uses one file. If your Flow has multiple Pull from Email Attachment steps, they will all access the same email / file.
• What happens when multiple emails are received by your flow: If your flow is processing and another email (or multiple) comes in, then they will queue up to be pulled into your flow in the order they were received. All emails sent to a flow (up to 1,000 total) will be queued up and processed.
• By default, emails that are sent to Flow email addresses must have a valid attachment. You can disable that, and allow emails without attachments, by accessing the email trigger management modal and disabling the checkbox.