Newsletter Scraping Made Simple with deliverhook

In today’s world, newsletters are more than just marketing tools — they’re often rich sources of niche content, curated industry insights, or competitive intel. But extracting that information manually from your inbox can be tedious and error-prone. That’s where newsletter scraping comes into play.

Whether you're building a content aggregator, monitoring competitors, or simply want to archive specific types of emails for later analysis, having a structured, automated way to capture newsletter content can save hours of work.

deliverhook makes this process dead simple. Instead of polling an inbox or setting up a complex email parser, you can just receive emails directly via a webhook – clean, structured, and ready to process.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use deliverhook together with Node.js and MariaDB to:

• Automatically collect incoming newsletters
• Parse and extract useful content
• And store it in a database for further use

How deliverhook Works

At its core, deliverhook acts like a virtual inbox that instantly transforms incoming emails into structured webhook payloads. Instead of managing your own mail server or polling an IMAP inbox, you define a custom email address and link it to a webhook endpoint. From that point on, every incoming email is automatically forwarded to your backend in real-time — as clean JSON.

Here’s how the flow looks in practice:

1. A newsletter is sent to your custom @deliverhook.com address.
2. deliverhook receives the email, parses it, and triggers your webhook.
3. Your webhook receives a structured payload containing metadata (like sender, subject, and date) along with the full HTML and plain-text content of the message.
4. You handle the data however you like — store it, parse it, or trigger downstream processes.
5. No mail server maintenance. No cron jobs. Just reliable, instant email ingestion via webhooks.

Setup: deliverhook + Node.js + MariaDB

To get started, we’ll need a few basic components:

• A deliverhook account and an active inbox address
• A simple Node.js server to receive and handle webhooks
• A MariaDB database to store newsletter content

1. Create a webhook endpoint

First, initialize a new Node.js project (if you haven't already) and install express by typing the following commands into your terminal:

npm init -y
npm install express

Then, set up a basic Express server that can receive webhook POST requests from deliverhook:

import express from 'express';
const app = express();
app.use(express.json());

app.post('/webhook/newsletters', async (req, res) => {
  const { from, subject, text, html } = req.body;

  console.log('Received newsletter:', { from, subject });

  // Save to database (we’ll get to that next)
  res.status(200).send('Received');
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log('Webhook server listening on port 3000');
});

You can now link this endpoint to your deliverhook inbox via the dashboard.

2. Prepare your database

Next, let’s define a simple MariaDB table to store incoming newsletters:

CREATE TABLE newsletters (
  id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  sender VARCHAR(255),
  subject TEXT,
  text_content MEDIUMTEXT,
  html_content MEDIUMTEXT,
  received_at TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
);

We’ll insert into this table from our webhook handler in the next step.