Is there an option to re-read mails from an Inbox (~1000s of emails per day) using Java mail API? We already have mail integration to read mails. Each time a mail is read by the application, mail gets marked as read and not eligible for second time (or subsequent) read.
However, is there an option to re-read already read mails using IMAP protocol in Java API?
Yes. Javamail and IMAP treat handle read and unread mail equally. Both do in fact offer options to toggle the seen flag.
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I have to create email tracking system, but the problem is that when the sender opens an email this is counted as an opening by the recipient.
When I send an email through Polymail (or some other tools for tracking emails), then in the 'sent' folder I have an email without a tracking pixel, but the recipients of this email have the pixel and at the same time everyone have different code inside (I think, to determine which of the recipients opened the email).
How is this possible? The sender and the recipients have different contents of the same email. Can this be implemented using smtp / imap / gmail-api?
For standard IMAP/SMTP setups (specifically: not GMail), the message is submitted twice, once to SMTP to be sent, and again to IMAP to be placed in the Sent mailbox.
There is no requirement that these be the same: in fact, in normal use, the BCC header, for example, is submitted to IMAP, but not SMTP.
GMail, and a few others, while trying to be helpful and save bandwidth, do the copy automatically, but make it impossible to supply different versions. (Unless you want to try to find the duplicates and delete them out of band).
Current Email protocols don't send any kind of ACK to the Sender when mail is opened. So you need to put some kind of analytic tool inside the mail contents to keep the track of it.
Some suggested methods and widely used tool is Bananatag.
Alternatively, you can use custom Google Analytics for the same. Refer here https://dyn.com/blog/tracking-email-opens-via-google-analytics/
I'm building a service which scans peoples email for specific PDF attachments and indexes them. I implemented this with OAuth2 for Gmail using their extensive Gmail API which works perfectly fine.
I now want to implement the same for outlook/live/hotmail. So I searched around, and I mainly read that you can "Connect to Outlook.com IMAP using OAuth 2.0" (tutorial here). The thing is that this implements a full IMAP connection. As far as I know this is more meant for aftermarket applications with which the user can view and send his email, not for applications which need to download some email in the background (like mine).
I haven't worked with IMAP from within code, but the main problems I see with this now is that:
If I read emails they will be set to "read" in the inbox of the user, which I obviously don't want (I don't want to interfere with the normal email usage of the user).
I will need to either stay connected with all email inboxes, or constantly loop through all email inboxes to get new emails.
My questions are actually;
Is there no other way than IMAP to get users outlook.com email?
Or are my problems actually not problems and should I just create an IMAP "receiver" for all the outlook email accounts?
In answer to point #1, according to Max, you can use body.peak to avoid this.
In answer to point #2, according to triplee, you can connect to all of the accounts and then use an IMAP extension called IDLE.
In answer to point #3, I found the Outlook REST API which includes options to read the email and you can call GET https://outlook.office.com/api/beta/me/messages on a regular basis to get all messages in the user's account or you can call GET https://outlook.office.com/api/v1.0/me/messages on a regular basis to get all messages in the user's inbox. You can find a full list of the REST APIs operations here.
In answer to point #4, I believe that some of your problems are problems and others aren't. I believe that you don't have any technical problems. However, I believe that you are correct that IMAP is not designed for applications like yours as is shown in the Wikipedia article on IMAP which reads (bold is mine),
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 3501.
Also, in RFC 3501 which defines the original IMAP protocol it refers to email clients which from the absract reads (bold is mine),
The Internet Message Access Protocol, Version 4rev1 (IMAP4rev1) allows a client to access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server.
I am working with Perl and using Net::POP3...
My code is able to get all the mails however I could not find any method in the documentation that can distinguish between read and unread messages.
IMAP does that, so I wanted to know if the same applies to POP3?
PS:: ping() method in Net::POP3 is not listed as capability of Net::POP3
With POP3 it is not possible to distinguish between read or unread. It can only fetch and delete messages. All messages that have not been fetched by the client (which remembers that itself) are regarded as not new by the client if it fetches new messages. The server doesn't care about the state of a message. It just gives you all the messages it has.
From Wikipedia:
POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to
remote mailboxes (termed maildrop in the POP RFC's).[3] Although most
POP clients have an option to leave mail on server after download,
e-mail clients using POP generally connect, retrieve all messages,
store them on the user's PC as new messages, delete them from the
server, and then disconnect. Other protocols, notably IMAP, (Internet
Message Access Protocol) provide more complete and complex remote
access to typical mailbox operations.
I'm sending newsletter using Zend Mail. I have used setReturnPath() to put all undelivered mail notifications in one place.
And what now?
How to get the list of addresses which were unreachable?
How do I read and parse the returned notifications?
How to know whether the mail returned because of non existing email or just quota exceeded?
Which headers do I need to send and check?
Related:
Variable Envelope Return Pathwiki
Handling undelivered emails in web appso
This class may be helpful. Can determine whether the mail is a bounce and return a response code with description:
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/2691-PHP-Parse-bounced-e-mail-message-reports.html
Short Answer:
you can't do that in a simple way and not in your app.
Long Answer:
You should handle that in asynchronous way and outside your php app (at least in part). First of all you must setup the return address to something like sender+recipient=recipientdomain.com#senderdomain.com as in the TimB answer. At this point all the notification sent by receiving smtp server will go to that address.
Then you need to setup the smtp daemon at senderdomain.com mail exchanger to handle that kind of bounce messages and process them in some sort of pipe.
With a pipe you can forward the returned message to an external program which parse the message and extract the needed informations (i.e. the reason why the delivery is failed)
At that point in your program (which can be a cli script in your application) you can mark the address as failing and optionally can record why.
This is a pretty difficult task, which can't be handled in a simple application. Usually I use a dedicated software for large mailing list handling such as sympa which takes care of this task for you.
Otherwise you can use an external delivery service such as Sendgrid which will do the dirty job for you and report the failing addresses with a simple API. As a bonus with this solution, they are in the whitelists for all the major providers, so your email won't be marked as spam as far as you respect some simple rules (i.e. removing bouncing addresses and use an opt-in policy for your newsletter)
Well, the second link and especially the answer by TimB explains very well the procedure.
What may not be clear is that the return path is nothing other than a regular email account, i.e. you will get the email to that address. Zend_Mail is not waiting for a response and hence there is no list of addresses.
I am trying to have a kind of observer pattern in ColdFusion
We want to listen to the incoming Email messages and act on them. Scenario is something like this :
Application sends email to the helpdesk system
Helpdesk system automatically generates a ticket and responds with an email to the email address of the application
The application's email is configured in the Lotus notes
Now the application should listen to this incoming email message, decode that and update the coressponding ticketid
I see there is a possibility with Event Gateways, but I am unable to realize the whole picture.
Thoughts or suggestions?
One way is to setup an email server with IMAP support, and use some sort of polling (every minute, good enough?) in CF using <cfimap> to get the emails.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WS371453EC-36D5-44ce-BF1E-750E3016BBD6.html
We have a system like this.
We have a postfix server configured to handle mail for a domain. A small script (Perl) on the postfix server places each email on an ActiveMQ queue.
We have a cluster of CF boxes with the ActiveMQ event gateway listener that takes the messages off the queue and processes them using Java Mail.
The delay between postfix receiving the email and a CF server processing it is generally under 1s.
We needed to do it this way for a number of reasons, processing delay being one of them, dealing with a large cluster of CF which made the POP/IMAP solution complicated, and CF's mail handling not being quite what we wanted were others.
It works great.
I've created similar applications in the past using cfpop to interogate a mailbox on a scheduled basis.
It was pretty easy to write, but usually gets thrown for a loop when "users" start being "helpful" with the email content.
The other thing is that this isn't instantaneous, but is the process really time critical to the second?