I often receive emails with signatures (footers; also known as “sigs”) like this one:
—
John Doe
Director of Flying Cars, Acme Ltd.,
A: 21, Example Street, Birmingham, B1 1AA
E: john.doe@example.com
T: 0121 555 5555
M: 05555 555555
W: www.example.com
(that first line is the standard sig separator of “dash dash space return”)
It’s irritating, if I want to add the sender to my address book, to have to copy’n’paste each item separately.
It seems to me that it should be possible for mail clients, such as Google Mail, to parse such sigs, and allow the user — after making any necessary edits — to add them to their electronic address books, without needing vCard (.vcf) file attachments or hCard microformat markup (which is not possible in plain-text e-mail).
It would need some agreement (or declaration by fiat) of which short codes to use:
A: = Address
E: = E-mail
T: = (landline) Telephone
M: = Mobile (cell) telephone
W: = Website
and which properties can be plural. It might be determined that the first line should be the name; the second the job title/company — but, as users would be offered an “edit” option before saving the data, that’s not a deal-breaker.
Some thought would need to be given to internationalisation, also: do the above abbreviations make sense to speakers of, say, German or French? What about Japanese or Chinese speakers?
Alternative
Even without the labels:
—
John Doe
Director of Flying Cars, Acme Ltd.,
21, Example Street, Birmingham, B1 1AA
john.dow@example.com
0121 555 5555
05555 555555
www.example.com
it should be possible to scrape some data (e-mail address, phone numbers, website, name if on first line) from a sig.
Over to you
Does anyone fancy writing a demonstrator plug-in to parse such sigs, for an extensible mail client such as Thunderbird, or a browser like Firefox or Chrome? Do such things already exist anywhere?
Hi Andy. Like your website and posts.
I think this is the same issue that OCR Card Readers try to resolve. I tried quite a few of them about 6 months ago using a ScanSnap scanner with various bits of software – and tested various iPhone apps where you could photograph a business card and parse the date in to standard contact fields.
However, they were all pretty clunky and unreliable. They did manage to do the OCR bit in the main – but when faced with the text structured similar to the email signature you give as examples, they failed miserably.
I gave up and decided to do what you do, cut and paste the whole lot – hike it over to Google Contact and then cut and paste the individual items in to fields.
Would be interested to hear about/test drive if anyone comes up with a good solution.
Hi Phil, and thanks for your kind appreciation.
Yes, OCR of business cards is very hit-and-miss; not helped by the fact that some people use very small, pale text in scanner-unfriendly fonts. Shooting themselves in the foot, really. My business card has clear text, a QR-encoded vCard and a text link to a web page with hCard markup and a downloadable vCard.
Andy – Did you make any progress on solving this?
Thanks,
Tim
No; I merely threw the idea out there for anyone who fancied having a go at doing so (as part of a hackday, perhaps).
Hi Andy and Tim,
My team has developed an app that does just that— WriteThat.name scrapes email signatures to update address books and CRMs (gmail, google apps, outlook, salesforce). It works 100% in the background, analyzing incoming email, and there is also a chrome gadget if you just want to grab info as well on-the-go.
Learn more here, and I’d be happy to answer any questions.
Cheers,
Brad
Hello,
Could this information not be added as optional headers in an e-mail? RFC 5322 allows for optional headers. Then an e-mail client could parse the address from the e-mail message itself, freeing up that signature space to be anything we want. I realise this might not be the approach you were looking for though…