Extract data from business letters and memos

Business letters and memos are the workhorse of formal correspondence, and behind the familiar layout sits a set of header fields that map almost exactly onto the fields RFC 5322, the Internet Message Format, defines for email. From lines name the author, To lines the primary recipient, and a Cc line the people copied; a Reply-To can redirect responses, a Subject states the topic, and a Message-ID and In-Reply-To thread one letter to another. Records teams, shared-service centers, and correspondence-management systems read the same header from a scanned letter that an email client reads from a message: who sent it, to whom, on what date, about what, and in reply to which earlier item. Dated 2026-06-15, a letter from Helena Braun at Fassbind Interiors GmbH to James Calloway at Atlas Retail Group, copied to two colleagues, carries exactly that routing metadata even though it arrived as a PDF rather than an email.

Header fields are scattered around the page and worded loosely, which is what makes them awkward to capture by hand. Sender blocks carry a name, a title, a department, and contact details spread across a letterhead, while the recipient block sits lower with a name, an organization, and a mailing address. Subject lines may be labeled Re or left implicit in the first paragraph, a salutation and a closing bracket the body, and a signatory block at the foot names who actually signed. Some letters are formal notices with an effective date that matters, such as 2026-07-01, others reference a prior letter that has to be linked, and enclosures are listed at the end. Memos drop the mailing address but keep From, To, Date, and Subject, so the same field set covers both a memo and a full letter.

Talonic reads the letter or memo and returns the sender and recipient blocks, the date, the subject, the salutation, a body summary, the closing, the signatory, and any enclosures as fields, aligned to the RFC 5322 header names. One letter dated 2026-06-15 from Helena Braun, Head of Procurement at Fassbind Interiors GmbH, to James Calloway at Atlas Retail Group, subject "Revised delivery schedule for order AT-4471", copying two recipients and enclosing a schedule, loads into a correspondence system as fields, and the same extraction exports to CSV when a register is the destination, so a records team files and searches letters by sender, date, and subject rather than opening each PDF.