I'm trying to send mails to some users which are basically built over images. How can I get those images to download by default in the users' (outlook) mailbox?
I did try encoding the image in base64 and sending it, not as a hosted image but embedded in email-html. But that too, did not work :( (I was SO sure that it would)
The client (organization) is well aware of this (that we'll be exchanging mails). Is there any setting that can be tweaked in the admin panel of MSExchange or o365 which can allow this?
Users have to have that set in their preferences. You cannot make it automatically do it as an email sender due to SPAM senders and security reasons.
Outlook allows adding hidden attachments, you may refer mention they in the message body (embedded images). In the message body you may see the following tags:
<img src="cid:some-image-cid" alt="img" />
The "cid:" prefix means that name refers to the attached image with the specified content ID.
Attachment attachment = newMail.Attachments.Add(
#"E:\Pictures\image001.jpg",
OlAttachmentType.olEmbeddeditem, null, "Some image display name");
string imageCid = "image001.jpg#123";
attachment.PropertyAccessor.SetProperty(
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x3712001E", imageCid);
String.Format("<body><img src=\"cid:{0}\"></body>", imageCid);
Before i start thinking about this programatically, does anyone know if it is possible to actually extract the correct url from an email link that is basically a tracking module?
Our work email system auto blocks tracking based urls from email, so i am thinking of writing something to extract the correct url so people can copy and paste the tracking link into a program and it will provide the correct url.
Is this even possible with the way that email tracking works?
Here is an example of a url in an email that i recently received:
http://t.dripemail2.com/c/eyJhY2NvdW50X2lkIjoiNTE0MTQ4NSIsImRlbGl2ZXJ5X2lkIjoiOTI0NzI2MTU0IiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYXhzaWVkLmNvbS9nY3NlLWNvbXB1dGVyLXNjaWVuY2Uvb2NyLW5lYS1ndWlkZS8_X19zPXphb2txcDVpaWN4NGkxZndtYmNnIn0
Our system blocks these. It eventually resolves to:
https://www.axsied.com/gcse-computer-science/ocr-nea-guide/?__s=zaokqp5iicx4i1fwmbcg
(got our network admin to check it for me)
I want a system that gets the right url from the ugly mess that is blocked so we can actually view links from emails.
Thanks in advance for any help.
The data in tracking URLs are typically a unique ID pointing to some entry in a database, or are encrypted with a private key, so there's no way to obtain any meaningful information from them. (see answers to this related question: Generate unique link for each website visitor)
More naive approaches will simply encode the data, in which case you may be able to extract useful information from them. Funnily enough, your example URL is a base 64 encoded JSON object containing the link itself:
{
"account_id": "5141485",
"delivery_id": "924726154",
"url": "https://www.axsied.com/gcse-computer-science/ocr-nea-guide/?__s=zaokqp5iicx4i1fwmbcg"
}
In this case you could actually resolve the URL on your own, but this type of approach is uncommon for that very reason.
I'm using Viewpoint to retrieve email from an Exchange server for creation of objects in a Ruby on Rails app.
I'm able to see that an image has been included, inline, in the body of an email, like so:
<img src=\"cid:94C552FB-8474-437C-AB44-DDF809047AB9\" type=\"image/png\">
And I can see an attachments node in the item blob, too:
:attachments=>{
:file_attachment=>{
:content_type=>{
:text=>"image/png"
},
:content_id=>{
:text=>"94C552FB-8474-437C-AB44-DDF809047AB9"
},
:attachment_id=>{
:id=>"AAMkAGEzNmExNzEzLTcxMjEtNDM5YS04NmE0LWE0NWU3MWZiMjEwNgBGAAAAAAB4VZcbdHrATrbGrKL0ANCfBwCjSVkOjPEtQoJN3xOKeIYJAAzyZ5e9AACjSVkOjPEtQoJN3xOKeIYJAA25w05NAAABEgAQAK9ad+6BP7VHru83AO7CTrU="
},
:name=>{
:text=>"Hollowbody 2.png"
}
}
}
My question is, how do I turn any of this into a URL suitable for use as the src of an img tag? I've seen answers like this one, but they appear to have special privileges in that
They're running in C#, which has special understanding of Exchange and the way it handles resource (I assume)
They appear to be running on the same server as Exchange, and have access to the same tmp directory where attachments are held.
If you're on another machine in another language, how do you get to these images? I know it's possible, since there are email clients on everything from mobile phones to refrigerators that can receive emails from Exchange/Outlook and render the image…
I have this account creation email that is sent out to anyone who is trying to create an account as I need to authenticate that they are who they say they are.
However, my issue here is that the URL where they need to click when they receive my email is too long and some email clients do not handle that very well and sometimes truncates the URL thus making the URL invalid when clicked.
Because the URL contains the domain name, the hashed email and a long activation code. It looks something like this.
http://domain.com/activation?email=75a5867d3df134bededbaf24ff17624d&key=8fecb20817b3847419bb3de39a609afe
While some email clients are ok with this but some are not...And I don't want to use HTML email and rather stick with plain/text email. Also I heard horrible stories using URL shorteners so I am not sure if I should use them...
Any insights in this area is appreciated!
I would definitely agree with Jason: shorten your url.
Think of what you really need.
Most likely the email address is in the database already, so you can refer to if with a short ID (let's say 7 numbers max). Your signature can be something very simple as substring (base64_url(md5(email+salt)), 0, 5). 5 base64 characters are 64^5=about 1 billion possibilities. This is probably secure enough (and what would the real damage be if someone registered with a wrong email address). So your url would be http://domain.com/activation?email=1234&key=aD5Y_, http://domain.com/activation?e=1234&k=aD5Y_ or even http://domain.com/activation?e=1234aD5Y_ . In the last format you know the last 5 characters are the key, so the rest is the id. Note that the code example assumes md5 to return in an 8-bit string format (and not hex string format), and base64_url uses a url safe base64 method. Also, some background info on a salt.
If your email address has a long id or needs to be encoded in the url as well, or the above is not short enough yet, consider an even shorter form. Basically this will result in making your own url shortener. Just before you insert the link into the email, generate some random 5 character string. Insert this string as key into memcached (or the database), with as value the original url. Then your url could be http://domain.com/redirect?key=rT-tW . When you see this in your app, just retrieve the original url from the database/memcached and redirect there.
Do make sure that your system is robust against the following:
Someone enters an email address (their real email), you send the link
That person changes their email address into something fake on the website before clicking the link, you send a new email to the new (fake) email address
They now click the link from the first email and your website confirms their email address in the second (fake) form.
One way to do this is make sure to use the email address itself (and not for instance just the user id) in the key generation, as suggested above.
I've used ColdFusion for sending text emails for years. I'm now interested in learning how to send those pretty emails you see from companies like Mint.
Anyone know of a good ColdFusion tutorial to teach me how to make this work and not get hit by bugs or spam filters?
As Ray said, ColdFusion supports HTML email, which is how you make an email "pretty". A quick down and dirty sample looks like this:
<cfmail from="bob#bob.com" to="someguy#email.com" subject="Check this out!" type="HTML">
<HTML>
<head><title>My Email</title>
</head>
<body>
<!--- Style Tag in the Body, not Head, for Email --->
<style type="text/css">
body { font-size: 14px; }
</style>
This is the text of my email.
</body>
</HTML>
</cfmail>
That's it, you've just sent an email. Notice how there is nothing preventing you from sticking in any old from email address you like? That leads me to my next point, in which you're wondering how to avoid getting hit by Spam filters:
The short answer is: You can't.
Oh sure, you can do intelligent things, like not including the word "VIAGRA" in your email (unless you're trying to send out penile enlargement emails and want to know how to get past spam filters, in which case I'm disinclined to help), but let's assume you just want to avoid obvious pitfalls.
I can think of two things that might help:
Send out email from a domain registered to the from email address. I didn't make the rules, but this one can be a pain. Ie., If you try to send out proxy emails for myorg.com, and your server does not host myorg.com, some spam filters are going to block it. What is usually done is to apply some branding to the from email, like this:
<cfmail from="MyOrg.Com <DONOTREPLY#registeredsite.com>" replyto="bob#myorg.com" to="someguy#email.com" subject="Test" type="HTML">
</cfmail>
In this case the email is sent from your server at registeredsite.com, with a replyto being the proxy email address. Spam filters will probably be okay with this, since the from email address of *#registeredsite.com resolves to your server. Try to send out with bob#myorg.com in the from, and you'll definitely run into some places that will block you.
Use a physical server, not a cloud site. I'm running into this very issue right now, but if you don't use a physical server that is located at a dedicated IP to send out your email, and if this server is not the originator of the email, some places are going to block it. This means no EC2 or Rackspace cloud site--sorry, some sysadmins are inclined to put down the banhammer on anything that originates from one of these providers, seeing as it is so easy to churn up your own little spam factory using EC2 or Rackspace for very little cost.
Even if you take these precautions, however, you'll run into a situation where someone gets a hold of your domain name and drags it through the mud. They'll send out thousands of emails to the internet in your name--or rather, in your domain's name--and because of the insecurity of email, your domain will get added to someone's blacklist after a thousand occurrences of hotlove4u#registeredsite.com hit the sysadmin's inbox. There's nothing you can do about it, either.
Or you can decide to run a cloud app and use a remote mail server. But some jokers will get one look at the originator being EC2 and will say, "Nope, sorry. Denied." They don't care about the legitimacy of your organization, only the origin of the email.
Email is an antiquated technology that has been rushed into mass usage before we really were able to think of a better protocol. As a protocol, it's terrible....and yet we're stuck with it, for backwards compatibility reasons. You cannot possibly avoid the spam filter. 95% of the email on the internet is junk mail, and never even reaches the intended recipient. Just absorb the enormity of that statistic for a moment, and pull your ideas back to reality. Many of the spam-prevention techniques being used today are unnecessarily aggressive, and create a great many 'false positives'. You can shoot for, say 80% of your email being sent, but what it really comes down to is this: As soon as the email has been fired off, it's completely out of your control. You can only take responsibility for so much.
What do you mean by "pretty" - HTML based? CF supports html email. Just use type="html". You can also use cfmailpart to send both text and html versions of the same content.
Here's a good article on making HTML email using CSS:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters
Ray's answer is right on the money about the CF part, but most of making this work is about HTML, CSS and testing testing testing.
And I would add to this all that you can check whether a mail will be displayed correctly and whether it will get hit by a spamfilter or not by going to a website that is called litmusapp. You can send your test newsletter to one of their emailaddresses and then they will give you screenshots of how each newsletter will look like in each type of emailclient. Also it checks the newsletter against a few popular spamblockers and gives you advice on what to change.
I would start by finding an HTML template email that you like. Then you put it in the tags with the type set to html as mentioned above. You might want to consider doing the multipart email to handle plaintext (and blackberry) users.
I subscribe to the Campaign Monitor Newsletter & they also have a list of very useful articles here: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/
Might want to check out this ebook from MailChimp. Email apps render HTML in some unusual ways, so be prepared to use tables for layout.
Remember when you try to change the color of the font or background when you writing a cfmail, before you add #F0000, you need to ad extra # at the front of it, like ##F0000. Otherwise, it will cause an error.