Introducing Nylas ExtractAI: Sync, filter, and extract structured data from your user’s inbox

Introducing Nylas ExtractAI: Sync, filter, and extract structured data from your user’s inbox

8 min read
Product Marketing Manager
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Getting clean, usable, and relevant first-party data from email has been far out of reach for most companies. Today, we’re announcing Nylas ExtractAI to make it easy to extract clean and normalized data from emails for personalized user experiences that captivate users and encourage repeat engagement, automate workflows, and more.

Launch announcement

The use of AI in businesses is booming, and is tipped to result in over $1tn of spend over the next several years, which in turn is increasing customer expectations for personalized experiences and recommendation engines. In order to leverage this AI boom for personalized user experiences companies need access to first-party email data. Today, we’re launching Nylas ExtractAI, leveraging AI, NLP, and LLM to transform email data into valuable user insights. By accessing relevant data from your users’ email inboxes, you can develop innovative features and enhance user experiences within your app.

Nylas ExtractAI offers native inbox connectivity to filter, extract, and organize data directly from your user’s inboxes, streamlining data processing and automation, while minimizing manual workloads and removing the bottleneck of irrelevant data for training LLMs.

Unlike other parsers, ExtractAI is a full-stack email extraction API using advanced NLP, ML, and LLMs with a secure & direct inbox connection for automated data extraction and tailored data generation. 

Nylas ExtractAI works alongside our existing suite of email, calendar, and contact API’s, unlocking the ability to simplify complex use cases from a wide variety of verticals.

The challenge: unlocking the inbox

Your user’s inbox is an ecosystem of personalized data, full of communication, newsletters, orders, reservations, and more. The first-party data contained in email is an underutilized opportunity to innovate because:

  • Emails are an unstructured combination of HTML, text, and images, and they’re different with every sender.
  • It’s difficult to retrieve emails (especially at scale) forcing users to manually enter their data
  • Getting access to a single email means having access to the entire inbox, which results in ingesting PII that in turn increases the internal burden of security controls for user data

Building an email integration in-house requires a significant resourcing investment. Similarly, building new AI and ML models requires specialized engineers. With ExtractAI, you can build functionality powered by first-party user email data faster, without the overheads of maintaining complicated integrations, and up to 92% cheaper than an LLM. Backed with enterprise-grade security and compliance measures, such as end-to-end data encryption, GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA/HITECH, and ISO 27701 compliance, Nylas ExtractAI provides secure access to your user’s data.

What does Nylas ExtractAI do?

Nylas ExtractAI retrieves data from your user’s mailbox and provides it to your application in a simple, structured JSON object. It’s available through both webhooks for real-time updates and through an API endpoint for historical data.

  • Nylas Hosted Auth or Custom Auth securely authenticates with your user’s mailboxes Nylas Email API syncs your user’s mailboxes without storing any data.
  • Nylas ExtractAI filters inbound emails for the data you need, classifying emails by purpose, and then extracts only the data you need.
  • Nylas ExtractAI delivers real-time data via webhooks, and historical data can be accessed through API calls.

Nylas ExtractAI launches with E-Commerce Extractors for online purchases and shipping tracking, and supports products that need to personalize the buyer’s journey with e-commerce data. For example: expense management, budgeting applications, and finance products like Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) firms. 

Regions

  • United States 
  • United Kingdom 
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Sweden

Merchants

  • Over 30,000 global e-commerce merchants (most common merchants)
  • Support for major regional delivery companies
  • Need more merchants and other regions? Talk to us

How does it work?

From your user’s point of view, they’ll see a ‘Connect with Google’ or a ‘Connect with Microsoft’ button inside of your application. Once they follow the provider’s OAuth flow, within seconds they’ll see their data in your application.

Your application will direct a user to authenticate their Gmail or Microsoft Office365 account, using either white-labeled Nylas Hosted Authentication or Custom Authentication. We’ll turn that authenticated account into a Nylas grant_ID which you can use to access your user’s inbox.

Behind the scenes, Nylas ExtractAI will connect to your user’s inbox and begin extracting data. It’ll filter through emails in the inbox, classify relevant emails based on their purpose, and then our custom AI, ML, & NLP models will extract data from the emails most relevant to the Extractor you’re using. For example, using an E-Commerce Extractor will filter & extract data such as item SKU’s, item images, quantities, prices, and more across all emails in the user’s inbox.

Nylas ExtractAI sends webhooks to your application containing the specific data your Extractor identifies, including text and hosted images. Your application can also request historical data to be extracted by making requests to our API. 

Nylas ExtractAI is available through the Nylas dashboard. Try free 600 extracted messages. You can find our technical documentation and code samples here.

There are two ways to get data from Nylas ExtractAI: webhooks and API calls. 

Webhooks

Our webhooks will stream data to your platform automatically as messages are synced & extracted. This gives you individual notifications when your end user receives new email messages. You can find a guide for enabling the ExtractAI webhooks here.

They can be accessed by subscribing to the following webhooks in your Nylas application.

  • E-Commerce orders: message.intelligence.order
  • E-Commerce shipping tracking: message.intelligence.tracking

API calls

Historic data can be retrieved by making API requests to our /consolidated-order and /consolidated-shipment endpoints with a valid GrantID.

The Consolidated Orders endpoint allows you to retrieve historic purchases with data like merchant name, individual items and prices.

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/grants/<NYLAS_GRANT_ID>/consolidated-order' \
  --header 'Accept: application/json' \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <NYLAS_API_KEY>' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json'   

The Consolidated Shipment endpoint retrieves a list of shipping emails for orders with their tracking number, tracking link, and more.

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/grants/<NYLAS_GRANT_ID>/consolidated-shipment' \
  --header 'Accept: application/json' \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <NYLAS_API_KEY>' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json'   

Supported use cases

Personalize user experiences

First-party data was locked inside of user inboxes & inaccessible, which prevents it from being used to personalize your customer’s experience with your product. Build a personalized customer experience, enabled through AI, that converts users up to 10x more and for a fraction of the cost of other AI tools. Give every user a unique experience with recommendations tailored to them with data like the purchases they’ve made, or the places they’re traveling to.

Intelligent data extraction

The amount of data that you can collect about your users is limited, which creates a gap in the understanding of your customer’s behaviors. Gain access to and analyze real world data to recognise patterns that help you understand trends to drive product innovation and compete with the largest organizations.

Automate manual, tedious user workflows

Your customer’s inbox is an ecosystem of data of the tools they use & the services they subscribe to, but they have to manually bridge the gap between receiving an email & completing their job. Not every system has an API, but with ExtractAI you can treat your user’s inbox as a source of data for automation. Leverage the data in your user’s inbox to save them time by automating manual tasks, like automatically building expense reports, travel itineraries, or email outreach. 

What’s coming next?

Nylas ExtractAI launches today for e-Commerce extraction in five markets, with major shipping networks for those markets, and over 30,000+ e-commerce merchants. But E-Commerce Extraction is just the beginning. We’ll be continually investing in ExtractAI to:

  • To expand to new markets, new merchants, and more shipping coverage to support more regions
  • Add coverage for returns
  • Create new Extractors, like Travel Extractors to pull flight bookings, hotel reservations, and car rentals
  • Built custom extractors for B2B applications
  • Extractors that understand the relationships between conversations and participants

Next steps

For developers new to Nylas, you can sign up to our dashboard and start playing with a fully featured sandbox. This supports both Google & Microsoft accounts out of the box, and has access to our E-Commerce Extractors. If you’re an existing customer looking to explore ExtractAI, learn more about our functionality in our Documentation.

Looking to find out how the data from ExtractAI can be used by your application and benefit your customers? Reach out today for a demo with our team.

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