AgentExtract

Email quote & signature extractor. Given an email's text and/or html, it strips the quoted history — the "On … wrote:" reply chain, forwarded blocks, >-quotes — along with trailing boilerplate noise, leaving just the sender's new content. It's pure string/regex with no DOM parser and no ML, so it runs cheaply on a Lambda Node.js runtime.

AgentExtract is maintained and used by AgentMail.

Install

npm install agentextract

Usage

import { extractEmailBody } from 'agentextract'

const { extractedText, extractedHtml } = extractEmailBody({
  text: 'Sounds good!\n\nOn Mon, Jun 1 Bob <bob@x.com> wrote:\n> old quoted message',
  html: '<div>Sounds good!</div><blockquote>old quoted message</blockquote>',
})
// extractedText === 'Sounds good!'

API

extractEmailBody({ text?, html? }) → { extractedText?, extractedHtml? } is the main entry point. It runs the quote cut and noise-strip on whichever fields you pass; a field that throws is dropped from the result rather than failing the whole call.

The underlying stages are exported too, if you need them on their own:

• extractNewContent(text) / extractFromHtml(html) — the raw cut, before noise-stripping
• stripNoise(text) / stripNoiseHtml(html) — trailing-boilerplate removal
• isTrueDsn(text) — DSN / bounce detection

What it does that off-the-shelf engines don't

Benchmarked against TalonJS and Mailgun Talon on a real corpus of ~41k messages (exact-match vs a gpt-4o answer key, graded on the cut):

Capability	AgentExtract	TalonJS	Mailgun Talon
Quote cutting (On-wrote / > / From: / Original-Msg)	yes	yes	yes
Glued "On…wrote:" orphan fix	yes	no	no
Foreign-language attributions (12+ langs) + Chinese/Arabic	yes	limited	limited
DSN / bounce keep-whole	yes	no	no
Forward keep-whole	yes	no	no
Inline-reply keep-whole	yes	no	partial
HTML trailing-signature reattach	yes	no	no
Noise-strip (mobile sigs / disclaimers / footers)	yes	no	no

Per-feature exact-match % (AgentExtract / TalonJS / Talon): on_wrote 96/51/49, no_quote 100/99/99, from_header 89/84/81, gt_quote 85/77/76, foreign_verb 87/61/26, inline 91/38/22, dsn 93/40/40.

Tests

npm install
npm test