spotd

What is this?

Spotd (pronounced Spotted) is a tool to help extract signature blocks from an emails.

The input email is assumed to be in a plain text format.

If you have emails in an EML/MIME/HTML formats you should first clean them up and extract the email's text before feeding it to this tool.

How to use?

Install by running this command:

npm install --save spotd

Then use it like this:

var spotd = require("spotd");
let email = `
Hello,
 
This is a sample email to test spotd library. It should detect this email's signature.
 
Give attitude scratch at fleas, meow until belly rubs, hide behind curtain when vacuum
cleaner is on scratch strangers and poo on owners food for vommit food and eat it again
kitten is playing with dead mouse scratch leg.
 
Regards,
 
Harry POTTER
Software Wizard
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
[phone]
[e-mail]
http://github.com
 
This text is not part of the signature and should get ignored.
 
`; 
 
let signature = spotd.extract(email);
 
/* Outputs:
 
 
Harry POTTER
Software Wizard
Microsoft
[e-mail]
http://github.com
[phone]
*/

You can also place email examples in folder test/src and run them through this library to output signatures in folder ``test/dest`. For this, just place your files in src folder and run

npm run transform

How does this work?

Spotd works in a two-step process:

1. For each line of text try to detect presence or absence of a feature
2. Given a line of text and its features, decide if this line is a part of a signature or not.
   • For now the decision is made be mapping each feature to a score (number)
   • The target is to let a machine learning process to make the decision by itself

Below is the list of features used:

Feature Name	Description
EMPTY_LINE	Is it empty
PHONE	Does it contain a phone number
EMAIL	Does it contain an email address
LINK	Does it contain a link
LONG_LINE	Is it a long line (>60 chars)
FULL_NAME	Does it contain a name of a person?
SENTENCE	Is it a regular sentence?
NO_STOP_WORDS	Does it contain stop words?
CAPITAL_CASE	Is it capital case?
DOUBLE_DASH	Does it start with double dash signature delimiter
ENDS_WITH_PUNCTUATION	Does it end with a punctuation?

Supported languages

• French
• English