EMail Filters For DevOps Emails - azure-devops

I receive emails from a couple of Azure DevOps environments, my company system and a suppliers system. I had rules for the email notifications to move them based on the From address, which was different. Now all the emails come from azuredevops#microsoft.com.
Does anyone know if there is any way to easily distinguish where the email has come from ?
Is it possible to change the From address used by DevOps? I don't believe it is possible to customise the body, and basing the filter on the body is too much maintenance
Thanks in advance

Is it possible to change the From address used by DevOps?
The answer is No. The notification from could not be modified by users.
But, I can get what you are suffering. While have the notification emails comes from several organizations, its too messy to know exactly where they come from.
Now, for build or release notification emails, you can create filter subject rules to distinguish them. Because in the subject of email which about build or release, it contains the info of organization name.
But, unfortunately, until now, the org info just displayed in build and release notification. And also you could not customize the email content of notification.
You can raise the demand to Microsoft Developer Community, follow and vote it.
When there are enough communities vote and add comments for this feedback, the product team member will take this feedback seriously.

I have found a work around in order to filter my emails, in case anyone else has the same issue.
The emails contain links to take you to the work item or other DevOps page that the email is related to. I've been able to create a filter based on the Url that the link is pointing to, so I'm looking for the specific DevOps URL in the Body of the message, as filing the email based on that. It seems to work for my requirements at least.

Related

Azure DevOps - linking to an email from a work item

In our team we simply want to link to existing e-mails. I see many explanations online on how to make an automated procedure that triggers when an e-mail comes in, but that's not what we want.
We simply want to link to an e-mail in our inbox in the work item.
Something like 'Refers to: 'e-mail'' .
Unfortunatelly, it's not supported to link work items with existing emails.
Link types: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/queries/link-type-reference?view=azure-devops
You may add the links of emails to Description as a workaround.
In addition, you could add a custom field to support tracking data requirements you have that aren't met with the existing set of fields. Please refer to this document: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/settings/work/add-custom-field?view=azure-devops

How does one add an email to an automation in Sendgrid?

In Sendgrid, I have a live automation of welcome emails.
I need to add a second email to that series but I do not see the option to do so.
Can someone guide where it might be available?
In the sendgrid Help-center, it states the following:
To add more emails to this automated series, click Add an Email.
However, I am not able to find the option of 'Add an Email' on the UI
Twilio SendGrid developer evangelist here.
Once you set an Automation live you can no longer add emails to it, though you can edit the existing email content.
To add a new email to an Automation, you can duplicate the Automation (under "Automation options") then add the new emails. Once you are happy, you can set the new Automation live and disable the old one.
You will need to disable and then duplicate the automation before you can add an email. However, good luck trying to reorder emails on the duplicated automation, you can't, which is tragic 😂.
SendGrid has one of the worst UI/UX for a company of its size. We have been using them for years and are finally tired enough to leave them, every person on our team finds it so tiring to use.

Does SendGrid support double opt-in as a feature?

Does SendGrid support double opt-in to Lists as a feature or is that something we will have to implement for ourselves?
https://sendgrid.api-docs.io/v3.0/contacts-api-recipients/add-recipients
It doesn't appear to me to be anywhere in the docs, but I thought I'd ask in case I missed it.
Not as of the current date; I asked their support staff and received the following answer:
Double opt-in needs to be implemented by you in the form/page you're subscribing your recipients. The confirmation email can be sent through SendGrid.
For Marketing Campaigns we have the SendGrid’s WordPress Subscription Widget that makes it easy for people visiting your WordPress site to subscribe to your marketing emails;
or Building a SendGrid Subscription Widget.
I got this answer from their support. It turns out we have to implement it by ourselves.
The double opt-in functionality is not something SendGrid provides as
we expect our customers to handle any opt-in practices on their side.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
SendGrid will be GDPR compliant by May, 25, 2018. Please note that
SendGrid does not – and does not currently have plans to – use servers
or data centers in the European Union to process email. Thus, SendGrid
cannot restrict data to the EU. However, neither current EU law nor
the GDPR require this. Instead, what is required is that SendGrid must
provide "appropriate safeguards" for data that it hosts and processes
on its US servers (see Art 46 of the GDPR here). SendGrid offers a
Data Processing Addendum (DPA) to provide such adequate safeguards,
which includes provisions for when GDPR goes into effect.
More info on GDPR can be found here. Our DPA can be reviewed and
signed by filling out the information here.
They do not support it. I asked support many times, which is a strange as it would seem a company of that size could spare the dev resources to build a feature that literally all of their customers need.
However, https://sgwidget.com is a third party product that provides double opt in functionality for Sendgrid accounts.
Full Disclosure: I am a developer at SG Widget.
No, indeed still today, they do not. Not in their forms, nor in their API is there simple, flip-switchable support for double opt-in. But, with email automation fairly recently implemented in their marketing services ("free" and "advanced" plans, not "essential") you can send an automated email directly upon sign-up.
My solution is to have 2 lists for new contacts, where one is a "pre-confirmation" list and the other being the "real" list. Here´s a way to use automation:
Create initial signup form, either via their sparse Web forms or via your own, using HTML/JS/PHP and API endpoint:
Create 2 separate lists, one for "pre-confirmation" emails and the other for people who confirm their addresses.
Make the form sign up new contacts to the first list, "pre-confirmation".
Create a marketing automation flow that triggers upon new signups to the "pre-confirmation" list. Make the automation trigger an email that contains a button or a link with the following link structure:
https://yoursite.com?email=user#email.com&passphrase=[phrase-you-set-manually]
where ?email= is your user´s email, substitute this in the email template/design by {{ Sender_Email }}
where &passphrase= is a phrase long enough to not be guessed. Since you only have one single email design here, and you can only enter one single phrase, unless you make a script or a hash, you make it difficult enough for people to think it was generated by a server :).
On your server/application, yoursite.com, use $_POST['email'] and $_POST['passphrase'], or whatever you name them, to validate the email clicks from your list and then enter all validated emails to the correct list using the PUT
/marketing/contacts endpoint.
you may also have to delete the user from the previous list, using DELETE
/marketing/lists/{id}/contacts, but I do think that the PUT /marketing/contacts takes care of placing the contact in only the lists specified in the list_ids field.
once the contact has been entered into the correct list, you can also have a marketing automation set up for that list, which sends him/her a welcome message.
This method takes care of double opt-in for SendGrid without using one single email credit from the Email API (transactional plan). The only catch is that we utilize one initial and one second/final list to achieve it.
Note: the initial sign-up message that here acts as the "confirm your email" message, will be tied to the first list and will require a marketing unsubscribe link in the footer. Make it clear in the bottom of the email that it is a temporary list, to not get any spam complaints. But it will not be an issue, as we wont be sending to anyone in that list except for this initial time. Unless you have a user who enters his/her email twice, after some time of inactivity when they forgot they already signed up. That could happen. But it´s a separate issue.
I think this is possible by switching the flow of a typical email subscriber. When the user clicks your subscribe button, instead of calling the sendgrid members/contact PUT api to add to your list, send an email with a link to a URL of yours that will then trigger the members/contact PUT api call.
Not sure what stack you are using but I was able to build something like this with next.js utilizing their api routes

Automatic invites to your github organisation

At the moment for a Github organisation of mine, potential members have to be manually searched for an added. Is there way a to make your Github Organization public, so people can easily and automagically join your cause?
I am a beginner with Github, but have searched a lot and they don't seem to have this feature. Is it a plugin anywhere?
I see 2 problems, either of which would be nice to fix.
Why can't users request an invite to your organisation, even if you have to manually approve?
Why can't I send out bulk invites to say an email list? Or can I do this?
Thanks Stack Overflow
I don't know why Github doesn't offer anything like this functionality. Github Organisations seem still kind of underdone, and I look forward to them making them more useful. For the moment I have something which can help you with one of your problems.
Second Problem: Bulk Invites
After needing bulk invite students for a university club I am a part of, I created thundergolfer/automated-github-organisation-invites. It's a Heroku deploy-able web app that allows anyone with access to the URL to get themselves an organisation invite automatically.
It uses the Github API to do basically what you need. You can send out a bulk email with a link to the web app. Job Done.
First Problem: Users requesting invites
The problem with the above solution is that you don't get a chance to review who requests an invite. They are automatically added. Perhaps when I get time in the future I can extend the project above to allow you to capture requests and then review them before sending out the email.
I am not sure about the first point. But the second point should be no problem. You can use the GitHub API to invite members to your organisation. You can read more about it here:
https://developer.github.com/v3/orgs/members/#add-a-member
If using GitHub classroom then you can solve both problems. In the classroom you can add multiple email invites at the same time (or link with a LMS to get the list of people to invite automatically, both are explained here). You can also create an assignment and end up with a link that can be sent to people to join. Within an assignment there can be auto Team and Repo creation.
With your second problem another option is a python script that can bulk invite users to a GitHub organisation:
https://github.com/RobbyJ/github_batch_organisation_invite

TFS Work item solutions for attaching email communications

For a couple of days now I've been searching for a solution that integrates ongoing work item communication over email into a specific work item's history.
For example once a ticket is created, if a specific TFS email account is included in email correspondence related to a specific ticket, some service would parse the TFS email account, read the email contents and attach the conversation to the work item. I've seen other ticketing systems support similar functionality.
The major problem I'm trying to solve here is to increase productivity by automatically keeping all tickets in sync with related conversations without user intervention.
Does anyone know of any commercial or open source products that can support this functionality?
I just implemented a cloud service using SendGrid that accepts emails at [workitemid]#mycloudservice.com and appends the email to the History of the work item. So if you forward an email to 1234#mycouldservice.com, the email date/subject/body is appended to the History of work item ID 1234.
Right now I have a lot of things hard-coded to my personal usage, but I'm thinking of making it generic/configurable for public usage. The big caveat is that the TFS server needs to be internet-visible (works great with Team Foundation Service). I'll update this answer when(if) I open it up for general usage. The code that handles the SendGrid POST is here if you're interested.
There is also the TeamCompanion Outlook add-in, that gives you a button in the ribbon to attach the current email to a work item. The last round I went with TeamCompanion I found it OK, but a bit buggy, and it may have slowed Outlook down (or that could have been psychological).