{{tag>Manuals How_To Emails}}
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====== How to process e-mail based on its contents ======

In order to process the received e-mails you need to define business rules attached to the event of receiving an e-mail notification – see the “[[docs:2500_config_apps:2300_emails:0100_incoming_emails|Incoming E-mail]]” section. The rules may check the subject and/or body of the e-mail (or maybe who it is from and when it was sent) and perform the appropriate actions. For example,

<code aim>IF IncomingEmail.Subject = 'Registration' AND IncomingEmail.From = 'John Smith' THEN ... </code>


If e-mails contain complex information that you want to analyse then this information may be encoded into the body of the message in a special format (you have to mandate that the senders of such e-mails encode the bodies of their e-mails in this format). The format is described in the ''[[a_f:a:set|SET]]'' Action section of the [[docs:3000_rule_language|Rule Language Reference]]. Your rules can then decode the information contained in the body of the e-mail using the ''[[a_f:a:set|SET]]'' action. For example, if the body of the e-mail has the following string:

<code aim>#Name#John Smith#State#NEW#Balance#100.0 </code>

Then the following rule:

<code aim>SET Account FROM IncomingEmail.Message </code>

will set the Name, State and Balance attributes of the Account objects to the values provided in the body of the e-mail ('John Smith', 'NEW' and 100.0). You can define other rules that will check these values and perform the appropriate actions if required.