Email and image url - how to prevent image blocking by email clients - email

From my application I'm sending email but email client (for example Mozilla Thunderbird) blocks the images. I use image urls from my website.
Is any way to prevent the image blocking by email clients ?

No. How do you expect to force a 3rd party application to download data it doesn't want to download? All you could do is make your email unreadable without downloading the images, which will increase the likelihood of both being treated as spam and of being deleted unread.

Related

How to know that an email message was read?

I have a software that sends notifications, quotes and invoices to "clients of my clients" by email. Sometimes people don't answer it very fast, so someone needs to call by phone to confirm if they received and get the feedback. I would like to automate this, to know if them, at least, read the email. I know this is very difficult due to how email works, but some companies already try to do this in a satisfactory way, like:
mailgun.com
mailchimp.com
sendwithus.com (YCombinator funded).
In HTML mail messages we can create a resource that points to the server, like a image. But mail clients usually ask permission to the user to load the images. So, problem
here.
But for text mail messages? Is there any way to know the email was read? How companies these companies do?
PS: I don't know what tags is the best to classify my answer, I shall appreciate any edit.
There is no way to be 100% sure if a email was opened, because of its architecture. There are some techniques to do this, but it always depends of user actions and mail client configurations. But:
For HTML messages you can use images and/or the return receipts (RFC 3798).
For text based messages you can use only the return receipts (RFC 3798).
About opening tracking:
Opens are tracked by including a transparent .png file, which will
only work if there is an HTML component to the email (i.e., text only
emails will not track opens). You should note that many email service
providers disable images by default, so this data will only show up if
the recipient clicks on display images button in his/her email.
(Text extracted from mailgun.com user docs)
References:
MailGun.com documentation.
Previous discutions on this thread.
As arnt says, you're fighting the design and basic operation of e-mail. Whenever you send a mail, there is a boundary between a MTA you control (or at least have an account on) and a MTA that is responsible for your target user's mail. What you can know is whether the user's MTA accepted the mail for delivery. Whatever happens afterwards is outside of your control.
Consider an example of a snail mail. When the package enters the recipient's box, you won't know whether they put the whole unopened envelope to a trash bin, or whether they opened is and read the contents very carefully. You can approximate that goal by using crude measures (like embedding a webcam-and-a-computer which will activate upon envelope opening and send you the snapshot of the face of the opener via a cell phone), but doing so is unreliable, unethical, and probably illegal in plenty of countries.
The "return receipts" or embedded image links are similar -- because the whole e-mail is already in the hands of the user's SW, they can do anything with it. A good MUA will probably ask before sending out dumb return receipts, and it also won't load remote images in HTML mail (because it's easy to create an http://trackme.example.org/mail/for/user/12345/message/666/image.png and have a database which says "hey, this URL belongs to Mr. Pichler, and is used in the first message we sent him). The most you can do is to ask nicely, and return receipts (RFC 3798) are a machine-readable way of doing just that.

Force to render images in mails

I created a newsletter with simplenews module and mime mail module in D7 and all the things like sending email and subscribing work correctly , but there is something i'd like to ask :
How can i render images in email ????
Now images are hidden in email and you have to click on "This message contains blocked image. Show images . "
Is there any trick that show images in email without any clicks ?
And
Why Yahoo-mail show mails in inbox and gmail show them in spam ?
What you asking for cannot be done by the sender. This is an anti-spam feature of the email client and by default, it will block images from unknown senders. Your message is appearing in the spam folder may be due to these and other reasons:
"Spammy" content
High image to text ratio
You've been flagged as spam before
There are many other factors that goes into deliverability, such as server reputation, user preference, user interaction and so on. Spam filters exist to keep unwanted emails away from users.
The only sure way to make sure you land in the inbox and have your images shown by default, is to get added to the recipient's address book (getting whitelisted) and have them turn their images on by default.
If you would like further reading or to perform spam testing before you send emails, check out Litmus. They're great.

How to avoid remote images blocking into email

I yet read some posts on the argument, but I'd like to know if there are some "new" best practice to follow to avoid email clients (thunderbird, Outlook, gmail, ect) block remote images in a html email.
Of corse images in the email have alt description; but there is a way to be considered a secure host to which download images?
Thanks
The biggest thing that affects whether your image will load or not is user interaction. If the user has added you to their address book, responded to your email, sent replies back to you or clicked on links, the email client will add you to the white list and ensure that your emails will be delivered, rendered and isn't spam.
The best thing you can do is send engaging content and give the users a reason to interact with your email.
There are also services out there, like Return Path's Email Certification that will cost you quite a bit of money but ensure much better deliverability to their partner email providers.

How to get webcam pics to our site from a Astak Mole via email

Basically we have an Astak Mole cam that can email images at regular intervals and we want to put the images in a folder and post it on the site.
Is there a way to use IFTTT.com
We can control the email address that receives the message and the server that will display the image.
Got any ideas?
I'm not sure about IFTTT.com but there are many ways to programatically get emails to a web server.
I wrote a blog post with the three main methods for programmatically accessing email. These are namely:
Setup an email server and have it run a script locally when an email arrives
Poll over POP3 or IMAP to an existing email mailbox and then download the messages
Use a third party (such as CloudMailin) that takes an email and forwards it as an HTTP Post to your website.
Any of these methods should allow you to do what you're asking, the option to choose is really about how much you need to scale or what you have available already.

How can I check if an e-mail has been read using POP3/SMTP?

How can I check if an e-mail has been read using POP3/SMTP?
I am able to read e-mails, but I can not figure out if the e-mail has been read or not. Any suggestions are appreciated.
There is no completely reliable way to do this, while some servers support Read receipts it is dependent on the client to respond to the receipt request.
Another way people do this is by embedding a tracking image into an HTML email that will get pulled from a server and that hit constitutes the read however this is often not accurate as most email reader block html external content by default.
Sign up for a free account on statcounter.com. Goto the install code options, choose invisible tracking button and HTML only counter. Statcounter will now provide you an HTML Image snippet that you have to insert inside the body of your HTML email message.
The image isn't visible in the email but the person will have to click "Display Images" when they open their email client.
This is about the only way you can do it if your server or client does not support read receipts.
With POP3, emails are almost always deleted from the server after they are read. When a client connects to a POP3 server, the server usually transfers emails to the client and then deletes the email from its own storage. So, if you can read an email, chances are that it hasn't been read.
As far as I know this is a client side only detail when it comes to POP3. If you wanted to have the status reflected on multiple clients you'd need to used IMAP. With web mail readers they keep track of the unique message ID and whether or not it has been read on the client, but if you were to load it on a desktop pop3 client, it would not be flagged as read.
store the latest read email's message-id somewhere and check when you run to pop
There is no guarantee an e-mail has been read or not, especially 2 cases we won't receive a Read Receipt,
When user opens an email for the message a pop-up confirmation window opens, if user selects No then end user wont receive a read receipt.
From email settings, If user selects Never send a read receipt then also end user wont receive a read receipt.
If user enabled Read Receipt then, the request for the receipt is sent as a header attached to the mail using the method
MimeMessage.setHeader("Disposition-Notification-To", "email-id#domain.com");