Import Reservations / Email Ingestion?

[carlyman]

With some commercial services, my favorite feature is being able to forward an email reservation (hotel, airfare, activity, etc) and the service automatically imports it and adds it to a trip itinerary. Setting up an email inbox feature might be too complex, but trying to think of other potential workflows...perhaps even a copy/paste of an email confirmation?

I find Surmai superior in every other way (I even like the minimalistic look!)....so been trying to think of workflow options for something analogous to forwarding an email.

[rohitkumbhar]

Thank you, I really appreciate that.

The closest option I have only thought of so far is to have a browser plugin that "reads the current page and sends it to surmai" and surmai will "figures out the details and adds it to the trip". In quotes because all of this is very hand wavy. TBH I have never used these services so I don't have a good idea about the automation or accuracy of the process to get trip data into an account.

[nemunaire]

I had the same need and started working on an automation with n8n that reads emails and tries to classify them.

I use Claude 3 Haiku, the current cheapest model of Claude, to read emails, extract information, and let it find the right trip using the Surmai API. It performs very well at this task.

Currently, I do the classification (whether it's a flight, hotel, activity, etc.) without AI. The downside is that each new sales point needs to be added manually.

After classification, I created two AI agents that can register a new hotel in Surmai and retrieve the flight related to a received email, respectively. Moreover, for some specific sales points, I'm able to update the lodging without AI.

In the end, each email is stored as a PDF with its attachments, along with the related transportation or lodging item, using Gotenberg for the conversion:

I'm new to the use of AI agents, that's why my work is currently hybrid. To make it more generic and usable by everyone, I think the classification should be done through AI.
I also tried to use Gemma 3, the smartest local model I've tested, but given the average size of confirmations emails, on my computer it takes more that 10 minutes to analyze, but with dedicated/recent hardware it should be possible to do it entirely locally.

So, it's feasible to handle email analysis with AI to push information to surmai automatically.

[rohitkumbhar]

Alright, I'm a bit late to this party but I do have some news. There is work in progress that will:

• Sets up a webhook endpoint so any mail server can post an event.
• Surmai will read the email text (via IMAP)
• Call OpenAI (or Ollama,depending on the config) to deduce entities (only flight right now but rest are in progress)
• Create any transportations (or more) entities and save the email as an attachment.

Caveats/Notes:

• The webhook post is a non-trivial amount of work because it involves a mail server. I am on the fence about managing email credentials to poll user's inbox. The n8n solution can work in that case. A push notification script for dovecot will be in the code.
• Might need to add support for full email contents in the webhook if the user chooses to go the n8m / iftt route
• AI calls are expensive, my testing with OpenAI was about 1c per email. Ollama with llama3.x, gemini3 produced really bad results.
• Privacy concerns about AI calls don't really have an answer right now so the feature needs to be opt-in

[nemunaire]

Fantastic! that sounds really really great to start with!