| status | date | deciders |
|---|---|---|
accepted |
2023-09-15 |
Idealos |
Our system scans users' mailboxes for e-mails containing information about bookings, as means to get notified of updates of bookings.
Since arguably every travel agency users different format of e-mails, the format changes in time and sometimes the e-mails can be malformed, parsing such e-mails is connected with non-trivial amount of complexity.
This raised a question how to use the incoming e-mails and what information to look for.
- Complexity of parsing e-mails of various formats and cost of maintenance of such logic
- The response time of the dashboard
- The user comfort
- E-mails are only considered as notifications of events (e.g. an update of a booking), and are only parsed to find a booking reference. The rest of the booking data is fetched from agency's API.
- E-mails are considered as bearers of various information about bookings and attempt is made to parse maximum useful information from the e-mail and to deliver it to our system.
Option #1 was selected, to minimise the amount of logic needed to parse e-mails.
- Less logic about parsing e-mails; typically booking reference can be parsed from e-mail's subject and parsing of the HTML body can be completely avoided.
- Delay between an event and update of dashboard is greater, since after e-mail is received, the data still need to be fetched from API.
- Every e-mail received requires an API call, therefore the amount of API calls might be bigger than with the solution #2.