1.4.2 • Published 10 months ago

@ch4nn0n/email-forward-parser v1.4.2

Weekly downloads
-
License
MIT
Repository
github
Last release
10 months ago

Email Forward Parser

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Parses forwarded emails and extracts original content.

This library supports most common email clients and locales.

Motivation

The original project from Crisp email-reply-parser relies on the RE2 library, which is not available on all platforms, namely some serverless and browser environments. This fork is a pure javascript implementation of the same library.

Features

  • Supported clients: Apple Mail, Gmail, Outlook Live / 365, Outlook 2013, Outlook 2019, New Outlook 2019, Yahoo Mail, Thunderbird, Missive, HubSpot, IONOS by 1 & 1
  • Supported locales: Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian

Usage

const EmailForwardParser = require("email-forward-parser");

const result = new EmailForwardParser().read(MY_EMAIL_STRING);

console.log(result.forwarded);
// true

API

Parse a forwarded email

read(body, subject) checks whether an email was forwarded or not, and parses its original content (From, To, Cc, Subject, Date and Body):

  • body must be a string representing the email body (as returned by mailparser, for example)
  • subject must be a string representing the email subject. This parameter is optional, but recommended to improve the detection for some email clients (especially New Outlook 2019)
const EmailForwardParser = require("email-forward-parser");

const result = new EmailForwardParser().read(MY_EMAIL_STRING, MY_SUBJECT_STRING);

console.log(result);
// {
//   forwarded: true,
//
//   message: "Praesent suscipit egestas hendrerit.",
//
//   email: {
//     body: "Aenean quis diam urna.",
//
//     from: {
//       address: "john.doe@acme.com",
//       name: "John Doe"
//     },
//     to: [{
//       address: "bessie.berry@acme.com",
//       name: "Bessie Berry"
//     }],
//     cc: [{
//       address: "walter.sheltan@acme.com",
//       name: "Walter Sheltan"
//     }],
//
//     subject: "Integer consequat non purus",
//     date: "25 October 2021 at 11:17:21 EEST"
//   }
// }

How does it work?

Email forwarding (i.e. when you manually forward a copy of an email by clicking the "Forward" button in your email client) is not standardized by any RFC. Meaning that email clients are free to format the forwarded email the way they want.

There is no magic bullet to handle such disparities. The only viable solution is to rely on regular expressions (a lot!), to account for each email client's specificities:

ClientDetectable via subjectDetectable via separatorSubject localizedSeparator localizedAll original information availableOriginal information localizedOther specificities
Apple MailYesYesYesYesYesYes--
GmailYesYesNoNoYesOnly some parts--
Outlook Live / 365YesYesYesNoYesNo--
Outlook 2013YesNo?--??--
Outlook 2019YesYesNoYesNoYesThe From and Date parts (only original information available) are embedded in the separator, rather than the body itself
New Outlook 2019YesNoYes--YesYes--
Yahoo MailYesYesNoYesYesYesThe original information are all stuck to each other, without line breaks
ThunderbirdYesYesNoYesYesYes--
MissiveYesYesNoNoYesNo--
HubSpotYesYesYesYesYesYes--
IONOS by 1 & 1?Yes??Yes?--

Contributing

Feel free to fork this project and submit fixes. We may adapt your code to fit the codebase.

You can run unit tests using:

npm test

License

email-forward-parser is released under the MIT License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.

1.4.2

10 months ago