I don't know if there's a solution to this, but let's ask!
I just set up a dlink ip camera. Every time it detects motion, it will send an email (from an address that I own, on Gmail) to my personal email address (on Gmail too). This email has six images attached: three frames taken before and three taken after motion detection.
I would like to store automatically, those images to an X folder on Google Drive (the drive of my personal email address), saved as date&time.jpeg.
I know that there's this script that does a great work at storing emails, but as far as I understood it stores the whole email as .pdf.
Maybe gmail has a feature that I'm missing, or maybe there's a way to do this..
This can be done using Google Apps Script. Refer this project
Related
I had recently made an email tracking system for a friend of mine (we track emails by using image tracking pixels). It is working perfectly fine, except for two cases..(we track emails by using image tracking pixel)
1. If I send a mail with tracking on, and then I open the same mail from “sent item”, it will read the image and will appear as mail has been read since the image was loaded again. And as such even though the receipent hasn’t opened the mail, system will still show it as a read mail
2. How do I track my email incase of multiple recipients? I mean how will i be able to check who has opened and who hasn’t out of the lot. I tried researching over the net, but found only few companies are doing that. Form what I could gather, they were somehow sending unique tracking out to all the recipents. Somehow they are splitting the mails when sent form gmail.
In emails these one sees companies using icons/ avatar showing up in email sender (without opening the email) .. similar to what favicon does in browser tabs, how do we set that up ? (see Medium, Wework. Brightalk example for below screenshot)
Most answers on the net seem to specific to Gmail and we are looking for a generic solution.
There's no standard for this. Every app has their own ideas and is often based on a proprietary or OS-specific address book.
I was implementing pixel tracking for a gmail web service, but since today google has changed the gmail client to proxy linked images !
Is there any work around, as the proxy is giving my server a fake/masked ip and location?
This is true. gmail has been proxying all user content via it thus showing Mountain View,CA as its REMOTE_ADDR. This is true only for gmail clients. The same logic has not been working on Gmail via outlook or any other mail client.
Most email tracking companies rely on these details to differentiate the recepients of the mail.
I dont think there is a work around. But if there is one we would find out soon given that these companies have a lot to lose.
Meanwhile, you could try using HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR or disposition notification headers. But given that this can be messed with, there isnt much option left but just go back to making people click on links!!!
In my experience as of Aug 5 2018 my emails sent with a tracking pixel are blocked by google. I uncheck the send tracking pixel box in my crm and the message arrives instantly. The tracked email never arrives.
I made a video to show but its exactly as I just described and quite boring to watch lol. BUt you get the point. Obviously this is just in my experience but it's too bad because knowing if my clients read it is only way know not to keep sending the same message in a different way assuming it went to spam.
Looks to me like they're caching, not just proxying.. I whipped up a PHP file to output a random image selected out of a collection of 5 images... It's the same image each time.. Testing against Yahoo! mail and outlook, both of which change each time the email is opened..
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.
I found How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam? to (hopefully) be a solid guide to avoiding being marked as spam. Are there any other important tips/suggestions?
How do I track bounces,opens,clicks?
These are features found in paid services like Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor.
Do the same as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor then. LIE about your stats.
There is no accurate way to track emails. If there was it'd just get blocked again. Most people don't want you to know these things and most email software ensures you don't. The stats provided by email tracking services are bogus.
Consider:
Most spam services will detect image
'bugs' and flag you as spam.
Image bugs don't do anything until
the user clicks 'show images'. This
does not mean they didn't open or
read it without images. How can you tell if a mail service downloaded the image preemptively to cache it or check it for image spam?
It can be difficult to determine the difference between a bounce and a reply due to differences in mail servers.
Only clicks can be tracked by redirecting through your server. Even then who can say that mail services won't start processing links in emails to determine whether the email is spam?
Opens can be tracked using a 1x1 picture file in an email. However, this is the same tactic that spammers use to validate email address existence, so you'll be fighting on the same side in that regard, unfortunately.
Clicks can be tracked by assigning a unique identifier to each link, determined by two variables: the URL that was clicked and the email address that clicked it. You can, for example, determine these on-send and store them in a database with the same unique identifier.
Bounces should bounce back to you with the email address intact.
I was looking at the email facebook sends out. In addition to an image, they use a bgsound element as a tracking bug like this:
<bgsound src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=99999999&s=a"
volume="-10000" />
I'm guessing the bgsound src is fetched by some readers when the images are off.
Check out Ask MailChimp: How do you track email opens?
if you really want to track bounces, use a service like Email Delivered (www.emaildelivered.com)
i also use Return Path (www.returnpath.com) for a really good reading on whats being delivered to the inbox vs spam box and what esp's are totally rejecting my mail.
Two ideas, clicking links, and statistical fudgery.
Clickthroughs
I would like to add that you can mark emails as read by a user clicking a "view this email online" or by tracking click-throughs. If a user clicks on any <a> tag in your email, send it to a script first that logs the email as read and marks which link they clicked on. This will give you can get a more accurate number.
Stats
I wonder if there is any research into how many users don't show images. That way you could 'statistically' correct for the lower open counts. Just did a bit of reading and found:
A 2009 report from Merkle states that only 48% of email recipients see
images automatically. This means that if an email campaign relies
heavily on images, it’s probably not being read by over half of its
intended recipients. Source
The same site says:
In the latest MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report (2010), a survey of email recipients found that only 33% have images turned on by default.
Somewhere in between there could be a useful figure (35-40%) of users not displaying images in emails. That doesn't necessarily say that those users are opening the emails. Just that auto-displaying images isn't enabled.
If anyone can come up with some more facts/stats, we could potentially get a correction factor. Just with this information I don't think you can do much other than marketing smoke-and-mirrors. For example, 30% opened the emails. Based on 35% of users not displaying images, that means ~9% of users didn't display images, but explicitly chose to turn them on for this email (not really, but just go with it). Let's say that leaves 26% to unaccounted for. You could "correct" your 30% to 56%! All with the magic of bogus stats and a touch of marketing.