Hey! So we’re on Zoom Contact Center, and I’m messing with an inbound email flow - trying to get signatures stripped off before it hits the ACD. It’s… not working, and honestly, I’m kinda stuck.
The flow itself is pretty simple. It’s just an email parser activity, then a data action, then the ACD. The parser activity is set to “Strip HTML Tags” and “Remove Signatures”, but the signatures are still coming through. Like, all of them. I checked the regex in the signature stripping section - it looks ok, but maybe I missed something? It’s the default regex, honestly.
I’m using the Zoom Contact Center UI to build this, so no SDK stuff involved yet. Just standard blocks. The email is coming from a bunch of different domains - mostly .com and .org, nothing super fancy.
The data action isn’t doing much - just logging the email body to a custom object (trying to see what’s actually coming in). Here’s what the logged body looks like… it’s kinda messy.
<p>This is the email body.</p>
<p>Best regards,</p>
<p>John Doe</p>
<p>Senior Manager</p>
<p>Acme Corp</p>
<p>Phone: 555-123-4567</p>
<p>Email: john.doe@acme.com</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Disclaimer: This email is confidential...</p>
I was expecting the “Remove Signatures” setting to just… remove everything after “Best regards,”. Am I missing a setting somewhere? I tried setting the parser activity to ‘strip all HTML’ then remove signatures, but that just blanked the whole email.
Is there a character limit on the signature stripping regex? That’s just a thought. Also, does the order of the parser actions matter? Maybe it tries to strip the signatures before the HTML? I haven’t seen anything in the docs about that though. I’m still getting used to how all this stuff works.
The behavior you’re observing with the email parser - signatures persisting despite the configuration - isn’t entirely unexpected. It stems from the inherent limitations of relying solely on HTML stripping and signature removal flags within the activity itself. Those flags operate on a relatively simplistic heuristic.
A more reliable approach - and one we’ve found consistently successful - involves utilizing a dedicated Data Action coupled with a more sophisticated regular expression to target and remove the signature block. The regular expression must, of course, be tailored to the specific signature format your organization employs. The Great Cloud’s regex engine is fairly standard, so familiar patterns will apply.
const stripSignature = (text) => {
// Matches common signature delimiters like -- or Regards, Sincerely, etc.
const sigRegex = /(\r?\n\s*--\s*\r?\n|\r?\n(Regards|Sincerely|Best regards|Thanks),?\s*\r?\n)/i;
const match = text.match(sigRegex);
return match ? text.substring(0, match.index).trim() : text;
};
Think of the built-in parser like a basic sieve. It catches the big chunks of HTML, but the signatures are like fine sand - they just slip right through because they don’t follow a standard pattern. You can’t rely on a checkbox to solve a pattern recognition problem.
Does the parser know exactly where a signature starts? It doesn’t. That’s why the earlier reply about custom data actions is the right path. We’ve hit this when wrapping the /api/v2/conversations/emails endpoint in our GraphQL gateway. The logic has to live in a middleware layer or a dedicated Lambda if you want it to actually work. You fetch the body, run a regex to find the “break point” of the signature, and then send the cleaned string back into the flow.
edit: if the emails are coming in as multipart/alternative, make sure the logic is hitting the plain text version first. Parsing the HTML version is a nightmare.
That regex approach mentioned in the earlier reply is usually the way to go. We dealt with this during a migration from CXone where we had some really messy email templates. In CXone, the email parser is way more “set it and forget it,” but GC’s parser can be a bit hit or miss depending on how the sender formats their signature.
If the built-in toggle isn’t cutting it, a custom Data Action hitting /api/v2/conversations/emails to scrub the body is the play. Try a regex that targets common signature markers like “Regards” or “Sent from my iPhone” to truncate the string.
Are the signatures coming from a specific internal domain or is it all random external mail? If it’s just a few domains, you can build a more rigid mapping in the Data Action to strip those specific blocks.