Where does Email Parser store the settings?

January 18, 2017

If Email Parser is running as a standalone application (see the running modes) settings are stored per user. This means that all the items you see in the left panel and all the emails in the email history are linked to your Windows user account. If you open Email Parser from another Windows account in the same computer you will see everything empty, like you have just installed the program. When Email Parser is run as a Windows Service, the email processing will take place in the background. A Windows Service running under the SYSTEM user account is actually processing your emails and the settings are stored under this path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Roaming\EmailParser\. In both cases and as most Windows apps, configuration files are stored in a hidden folder called “Application Data”. As the path to this folder changes between Windows versions and configurations the best way to reach it is to simply type %APPDATA% in the file explorer, then hit enter:

After hitting the Enter key, the Application Data folder is shown. We have to browse a bit and search for a subfolder called “FrozenFrog Software”. Then open the folder corresponding with the version of Email Parser you are using. For example:

The most important file here is Settings.xml. It stores all the items of the left panel. If you are curious you can even edit directly this file with any text editor (such as Notepad) and add or remove items. Note that they must meet the correct XML syntax and beware that Email Parser need to be closed while you do it. Some customers with literally hundreds of email filters use this approach to add new filters. They successfully integrated other tools with Email Parser and automated the item creation in Email Parser this way. But, well, this is a topic for another post. Just for reference, the XML text that describes an email filter looks like this:

 <EmailFilter>
 <additional_filters_condition>Must_be_blocked_by_any_of_the_following_filters</additional_filters_condition>
     <name>emails from alex</name>
     <id>4</id>
     <enabled>true</enabled>
     <filters_email_from_the_email_source_id>2</filters_email_from_the_email_source_id>
     <from>alex@test.com</from>
     <apply_from>true</apply_from>
     <to />
     <apply_to>false</apply_to>
     <subject />
     <apply_subject>false</apply_subject>
     <body />
     <apply_body>false</apply_body>
     <received_after>2013-11-20T22:58:33.1822699+01:00</received_after>
     <apply_received_after>false</apply_received_after>
     <received_before>2013-11-20T22:58:33.1822699+01:00</received_before>
     <apply_received_before>false</apply_received_before>
     <apply_script_filter>false</apply_script_filter>
     <script_filter />
     <script_referenced_assemblies />
     <apply_additional_filters>false</apply_additional_filters>
     <ids_of_additional_filters />
 </EmailFilter>

You will also see folders named with numbers. These are the email sources. If you open them you will find many eml files and a database file. Every email in the email history window corresponds to one of these .eml files. The database.sdf file stores other data such as the processing outputs, the resulting fields etc. This particular file can grow huge:

As you have probably worked out, if you copy these files across computers you can move easily the program configuration. In fact, the “.epsettings” file you get after going to Preferences->Save settings is just a ZIP file of every file under this folder. You just have to append “.zip” to the file name to check this out.

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Where does Email Parser store the settings?