I need to send via agent some emails and I want to track the responses to these emails with an agent on the mailbox of the user.
Is there any field I can use to set/read to achieve this?
The flow:
1) the user create a document in a database (on the web);
2) the WebQuerySave agent creates the email, saves it in a mail-in db and sends it to the recipient;
3) the recipent sends a reply;
4) an agent on the mail-in db should read this reply and write some data back to the original document made by the user... and that's what I'm trying to do and I can't rely on the subject because it's all on the final users hands...
Is there any way I can do it?
Thanks for any advice.
Since you are dealing with outside recipients and can't control the software that they use or how they use it, it is going to be difficult to handle 100% of cases. You are going to need to build a mechanism into your solution for marking exception cases where automatic matching fails so that someone can handle them manually.
That said, you can set a special flag in your outgoing mail. Assuming that your webQuerySave agent uses mailDoc as the object name for the NotesDocument that it is going to mail, just do this:
mailDoc.ReplaceItemValue("mySpecialFlag",evaluate("#unique"))
In order to get this value to go out in the email, you are going to have to make sure that the Domino server that performs the conversion from Notes format to SMTP is configured with the outbound MIME option to "send Notes private items", which is described here. This will create a custom x-notes-item header in the outbound message, and as long as the receiving email system preserves it and copies it into the end-user's reply message, that header will be received back by Domino and converted into an ordinary NotesItem that your agent in the mail-in database can look for. I think that most ordinary mail software will preserve this header for you in replies, but you will need to be handle cases where the haeder doesn't come back either because the outside mail system's software doesn't preserve it or because the user creates a new message and copies the old one into it instead of doing a normal reply.
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In Cuba, web access is extremely censored, so I created a tool that allows more than 50,000 people to browse the Internet through email. Cubans send me an email with an URL in the subject line, and I email them back with the response. Read more at https://apretaste.com.
It was working like a charm, till the communist government of Cuba started blocking my emails. My solution was rotation.
I started with Amazon SES, and I was changing the domain each time it was blocked, but Amazon adds a header to all emails, and once they blocked the header no email from SES was able to reach Cuba any more. The same happened with Mailgun and others, they all add headers.
Currently I am creating Gmail accounts and sending via SMTP, but Google blocks me for no reason and only allows to send 100 emails a day per account. Also I can only create few emails using the same IP address/phone, so I was forced to use anonymous proxies and fake Chinese phones. Now I am fighting a war on two fronts.
An email can be blocked by three parameters: IP address, domain, and email address.
It will be terrific if I can set up my own Postfix server at a VPS that auto-rotates the IP address. Even better if I can simulate "gmail.com", to avoid purchasing a new domain every day.
All the intents to create what I call "the ultimate sender" just either reach the spam folder or add unwanted headers making it too easy to block. I feel exhausted. I hit a knowledge barrier here.
I know I am crossing to the dark side, but this is for a very good cause. Thousands count on this service as their only source of unbiased news, social network and to feel part of the 21st century.
Can you please help me implementing "the ultimate sender", or pointing to another solution that I may be missing?
I have a few suggestions for you.
The first one relies on The Onion Router also known as Tor.
Since you are crossing to the dark side, why not also take a look into the darknet?
Take a look at this list of Tor email providers. If you have your own email server that can be accessed through Tor, it becomes much harder for anybody to stop people from using this service. After all, Tor was developed to offer people uncensored access to the web.
You can read about Tor in detail here, it uses Onion Routing and this is how you would set up your server to use Tor.
Here is an example how you could use it:
The steps that involve the setup, receiving an URL request and sending back the reply are as follows:
Set up an email server.
Configure your email server to use Tor.
Publish the public service name. (e.g. "duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion")
Deploy a client that takes the service name and a URL, and let it send an email with a request to your server.
The client now waits for a reply.
You send a reply and the client receives it.
You can change your service name on a regular basis, but you need to make it accessible to those who will use this service.
Having an own email server means being able to control the email header.
Here is one example how you could make use of it:
Configure your email server so that it receives and recognizes
emails which contain the requested URLs.
Before you send a reply modify the email header so that it shows a random IP address and a random sender email address including a random domain name.
Send your reply.
Sending an email that way means that you cannot be replied back to. But since your reply already contains the requested information there is no need to.
I hope this helps.
Crowd source it.
Find a way that volunteers can send some emails for you. This is the only long term approach that I can think of. A simple web interface with mail to links would be be enough to get started although there are other potential problems with this approach too.
Because you are talking about low numbers of users, you could also use crowdsourcing to create the single email address per person approach. They can create an account on a specific set of email providers and give you the credentials. This would allow the single email per user approach or could be used to rotate through a large set of email accounts to send emails.
The simplest solution is perhaps to set up a local SMTP server on your own computer. You don't even need a server per se.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winsmtpserver/
There are many other such applications. They are usually used to test SMTP functions during local development, but there is nothing against actually sending spam through them.
I know this would be quite a large task, but how about pairing the users with one or just a few emails so they always receive an email from that email.
I'd assume people wouldn't have more than 100 queries per day, if so they could start receiving them from a backup email
I'd imagine it would look less suspicious for them to appear to be in constant contact with one unique email rather than 50,000 being in contact with one
I know this would be a huge undertaking, but I feel like it solves your issue.
Since the users are willing to receive emails form you then your shouldn't be blocked.
When you mentioned you are getting block does it mean your mail is going in spam or is getting lost in between sending and receiving or it is getting bounced back??
My suggestion would be to setup your own mail server and follow as below:
-Get approx 25 or more ip to rotate. (IP is the most imp part which is tracked and is accountable for the reputation of your mail server)
Don't start sending emails in bulk from the word go it is better to gradullay increase the email volume so that mail server reputation nicely built
keep changing the format of the email often
encourage user to add yourself to there contact list
your best part is user are willing to receive emails from you and you would reply to revived email is the USP of yours but still i will recommend you to register for FBL so that you would know which user is reporting you as spam and you can remove him from your list and never send him email again.
using best practice to send emails like dkim, SPF, dmarc are also vital.
Hope my answer was of some help to you. If you need step by step guide to step up mail server let me know.
My friend, do you remember what made Hillary Clinton lose the last elections to Trump?
It was the "mail" affair. And what was it? People discovered she shared confidential information through a non-official, non-governmental email account (i.e., she used some Gmail, Yahoo or another of a kind). Until here, nothing new with direct relation to your matters. But there is an small particularity on this history, and this can put, maybe not a solution, but maybe a light on a new path you could follow: Clinton actually never sent those emails; the email account she used had the password shared and the communication between people (Clinton-someone) occurred only using the drafts of the account.
How? One side logs in and accesses the drafts folder. There he/she reads the last message and edits it, cutting and writing new data - then save the draft message. On the next turn, the other side of the communication line logs in and do the same. And so forth, so never really sending those messages, but instead just updating the drafts (this "Hillary" method does schooled people... Dilma Rousseff, impeached ex-president of Brazil, actually did this method down there in Brazil too).
So, maybe if you could establish a pact with your user that he/she doesn't delete the account's password, you could pass those information by this method - without "really" exchanging emails. Maybe a "parent" email account (some that could reset a lost password) could be useful too.
Alternative: aren't you able to contract a regular HTTP webserver? You could rely on FTP to publish data to your user, he/she asks for it and you publish a page with that content.
Salvi, have you tried something with Telnet? OK, we are talking here about a text-only environment, but if nothing more would rest in the future, this could be better than nothing. Maybe you could implement a podcast-like, or push-like service based on it. Look what people do with it with references to your walk on the dark side...
If in Windows, open your command prompt.
Type telnet and press Enter.
Type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
Type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
By default smtp server can be configed in Sitecore web.config. However is it possible to hijack the whole email sending part to use a different method instead of a smtp server? Is there some kind of pipeline?
For example, I want to use another web service to send all emails, or I want to save all of them into a database instead of actually sending them?
Also a different question would be, does content delivery instance need to send emails by default? I would assume all out-of-box email sending are from content authoring instance right?
And from my understanding, there's only workflows in Sitecore need to send emails and it can be customized by changing the email action. (Assume no Email Campaign Modules, no Webform for Markets module and etc.)
Any insight would be great help, thanks!
--------------Update---------------------29/09/2015--------------
I have got my answers, thanks everyone.
Basically I shouldn't need to working about the smtp server on CDS instances, and all email sending can be controlled by pipelines on CAS instances.
However when I checked the source code, there's only one place "Reminder" which uses the smtp server to send emails directly. So if this function is important to you, you should consider update this function.
Yes absolutely.
At runtime when you are defining the SMTPClient you can set the properties for the server by the following code
SmtpClient client=new SmtpClient("Host");
client.Credentials=new NetworkCredential("username", "password");
MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage();
mailMessage.from="sender#gmail.com";
mailMessage.To.Add("recipient#gmail.com");
mailMessage.body="body";
mailMessage.subject="subject";
client.Send(mailMessage);
What you can do, instead of having the values hardcoded in the code you can retrieve the values from Sitecore Items and use those, this will allow greater control for Content Editors and even use different SMTP Server in different parts of functionality.
Item emailItem = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem("Id of Item");
string from = emailItem["From"];
string to = emailItem["To"];
string server = emailItem["Mail server"];
string subject = emailItem["Subject"];
string message = emailItem["Message"];
There is a SendEmail pipeline apart of Sitecore's EXM aka ECM which you can override if you take the EXM route. It has two processors FillEmail and SendEmail which you can utilise or remove and add your own processor for actually sending the message.
It is possible to save the emails to a database, or rather the content, instead of sending them. This can be achieved by custom code in Sitecore or Webforms for Marketers which has Save Actions for Sending Emails or Saving to a Database and its really simple to configure.
As you said there is no need to send emails on every occasion its more about determining what you are trying to achieve and if Sending Emails, Saving to Database etc is more relevant. The great thing about Sitecore is you can create Items programmatically and store the information there, save you worrying about creating database tables, managing ConnectionStrings, setting up EntityFramework etc.
Here is a simple blog on creating Sitecore Items Programmatically.
Sitecore Workflow sending Emails is optional and can be removed by deleting the Send Email CommandAction Item from beneath the WorkflowState Item and then publish.
The easiest way to intercept all emails is to configure Sitecore to send all emails to the locally hosted SMTP server (127.0.0.1) and then grab them from there using your custom code.
There is a lot of free SMTP servers, just make sure you test them with high volume of emails before moving to production.
Given there is a "FAILTO=''" option for cfmail, triggering an email to be sent to that email if the email didn't get delivered...
Is there a way to somehow assign an ID or tracking # to an email, store it in a database with that ID... then update the status of that email if it fails?
I'd like to track bouncebacks... preferably WITHOUT sending the FAILTO to a POP3 or IMAP and then checking it with cfimap...
Is there any alternate way of handling this?
Maybe an event gateway that is triggered upon email failure?
UPDATE: I've decided to take a different approach, utilizing the sendgrid API.
I'm hoping that lends me with a few more tools than CF offers.
The short answer to your question is unfortunately no.
A longer version with a possible solution:
The failTo email address populates the return-path in the email header, this then 'should' be used by mail servers for bounce backs (however see - http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1899-GMail-Seems-To-Ignore-The-Return-Path-Header-Defined-By-The-CFMail-FailTo-Attribute.htm for an example where it doesn't)
So you are going to need to monitor an Imap or pop account to see your mails, however you can set up an event gateway to monitor this, with detailed instructions here - http://www.alagad.com/documentation/imapGateway/ImapWatcher%20Gateway%20Documentation.pdf
What you're left with is needing to identify which mail matches which bounceback, when I've done something similar in the past I used unique id's for the failTo email addresses at a domain I owned. If you set that up and then use your listener cfc to look for the id in the return-path.
So your sending code would work along the lines of:
Generate unique id
Send mail
Add row to database with unique id
Your listener.cfc would then need to inspect the email returned and if it finds the unique id update the row with whatever information that you're after.
Hope that that at least helps even if you'll need to set up some other bits.
You could use a directly watcher on the undelivr folder to log the failed emails, only really a solution if its own server and not a shared server though.
As far as I know once it leave the spool and is off to your SMTP server CF assume it's been sent correctly.
The email will trickle down the chain of SMTP servers/relays and if anything happen the only instruction they have is to bounce it back to the from address or failto address if present. CF isn't listening at this point so it can't respond.
We use an external tool called Glock email processor to handle exceptions. It's not free, but works pretty well. You can find it here: http://www.glocksoft.com/email-processor/
You need to configure it to check the failto address and from there you can take many actions. I got it setup as a three strikes system.
Email address bounce, I increment a counter in my email table, at 3 I deactivate that email from the system.
Nothing you can't do yourself with cfpop though.
Am trying to determine the best way to persist information from an originating email, through to a reply back.
Essentially, it is to pass a GUID from the original email (c#), whereby when the receiver replies back, that GUID is also sent back for reference.
I have tried setting the MessageID, whereby using Outlook, the In-Reply-To value is set with the original ID, however using some webclient email systems, that value is not created on reply. Is there another way to sent this info through email headers?
Some variation on VERP is probably the most reliable...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_envelope_return_path
Specifically, instead of having all your replies coming to the same address, encode the information you want to persist into the From address for the email.
For example, in the case of a helpdesk ticket, you could use something like:
From: Helpdesk <support-ticket-123#example.com>
To: End User <user#example.org>
Subject: Ticket #123 - problem with computer.
That way, regardless of what the user edits in the subject or text, you know what ticket is being referred to by the receiving email address.
I don't think you'll be able to do anything that is perfectly reliable by headers alone -- the number of clients that would have to cooperate is immense.
Most systems that do this work by including something in the body of the email that is sent that allows it to identify the message, and including text instructing the recipient to include that block of text in the response. You could also try including it in the subject (and including text in the body to leave the subject unchanged). That's how some mailing list managers I've seen do it.
I stumbled upon this question, and it's been very informative. This, however, leaves me with one question: Will using VERP, or a variation of editing the 'reply-to' or 'from address', cause the messages to be locked up in spam filters?
I have read that spam senders often change the bounce address to prevent their servers from getting clogged with bad email address bounces. Is it a spam risk to assume this approach?
The most reliable way is to put the ID in the subject, which should be preserved throughout replies.
(It doesn't hurt to tell your users that they should keep the subject intact.)
RT, a popular ticketing system, does this. They use a simple subject format like "[Ticket #123]" and key off of 123.
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");