My webhost imposes a limit on how many emails can be sent from my email account. I'd like to create an event that logs how many emails have been sent that day every time a new email is sent. If the maximum number of emails is reached, I'll switch my app to a different email account to avoid conflicts.
Creating the event shouldn't be a problem. My question is how would I go about setting it up so it fires every time an email is sent? Would it be something like extending Mail::send so that it includes something like this?
$event = Event::fire('mail.send', array($data));
Related
I'm using a certain SendGrid template for several different projects and am trying to find a way to stop emails from going out in some conditions, through SendGrid.
For example, lets say I'm passing SendGrid some parameters like:
{id, name, amount, date}
I want to stop that email from going out when i'm passing a certain id.
I know that I can change the email template i'm sending with conditionals using handlebars:
From here
But Can I actually stop the mail if some condition happens?
In my case, every time I send the id = 5
You can control the body of the email using Handlebar templating, but by that point, you have already told SendGrid to send email with the data you provided. You cannot stop the email from being sent from within Handlebars.
If you're using code to tell SendGrid to send these emails, you could check in your code if the id equals 5, and if so, do not send an email.
If you're using Single Sends to send an email to SendGrid Contacts, you could to store this id field as a custom field, and create a segment or update your existing segment to filter out the contact with that id.
I would like to know if there is a way from an email sender side to specifically ask Gmail not to take into account an email while trying to generate an event.
This is because one of our emails sends information about an abandon purchase and it is currently automatically generating an event on the user's calendar. This generates a problem for the user because he does not actually has a reservation.
I'm making a quick Google App Engine program that presents a publicly available form that users can fill out with their name and email address, then can enter a friend's name and e-mail address. The application pulls in the data via POST, then sends a pre-formatted e-mail like 'Hi, , your friend wants to invite you...'
What should I be doing to prevent spammers from exploiting this publicly facing e-mail sending program? Is there a good resource for best-practices in this field? I've spent a few hours searching, but I haven't really found anything definitive...
Principally creating a publicly available form that anyone can use to send[s] a pre-formatted e-mail is another name for creating a spam machine.
You can mitigate by making it harder for non-humans to use it, recaptcha is the typical way to achieve this.
You could send a confirmation email to the sender and require a secondary action (like clicking a link) before sending the email. Or, if you expect your users to return, ask them to sign up (with a similar confirmation) before allowing them to send email.
I would first impose some limit to the # of email addresses a specific user/IP can send. This won't solve the problem but will limit the damage in case someone does try to send spam to 1000 emails.
Second, you could try sending the emails in small batches if an user puts in a lot of email addresses. Send 5 at a time, and monitor to see if there's any spam complaints (you can probably automate this somehow). If no complaints after 2 days, keep sending the rest.
Currently in our application admin of a company invite multiple users to system. Our design is:
take admin chosen separated email addresses, check user if exist and member of current company do nothing. if exist but not member of current company do some setup and add to company and send welcome email. if not not exist set user account add to company and send invitation email. But there is a hard roadblock. Admins want to invite up to 5000 emails. Because of currently we invite in web application and send email one by one (we have to, because of uniqueness and activation code) admin can't invite more than 20-30 emails at same time, because of timeout.
I thought to take email to another table and do operation with timer?
What is the best practice for this ?
Enviorenment
ASP.NET MVC2 on amazon-ec2 server. Also we have timer quartz.net
I come from a linux/PHP background but it seems to me your problem can be solved with a queue?
You basically get all the emails you need sending add them to the queue and have another process take a few emails off the head of the queue and send. Rise, repeat until queue is empty.
Since you are on EC2, have you taken a look at how Amazon SQS might be able to help? If you want a readymade component, I googled and found this email queue component for asp.net that seems to solve the exact problem you are having (although will cost you $)
I'm looking for some opinions here, I'm building a web application which has the fairly standard functionality of:
Register for an account by filling out a form and submitting it.
Receive an email with a confirmation code link
Click the link to confirm the new account and log in
When you send emails from your web application, it's often (usually) the case that there will be some change to the persistence layer. For example:
A new user registers for an account on your site - the new user is created in the database and an email is sent to them with a confirmation link
A user assigns a bug or issue to someone else - the issue is updated and email notifications are sent.
How you send these emails can be critical to the success of your application. How you send them depends on how important it is that the intended recipient receives the email.
We'll look at the following four strategies in relation to the case where the mail server is down, using example 1.
TRANSACTIONAL & SYNCHRONOUS
The sending of the email fails and the user is shown an error message saying that their account could not be created. The application will appear to be slow and unresponsive as the application waits for the connection timeout. The account is not created in the database because the transaction is rolled back.
TRANSACTIONAL & ASYNCHRONOUS
The transactional definition here refers to sending the email to a JMS queue or saving it in a database table for another background process to pick up and send.
The user account is created in the database, the email is sent to a JMS queue for processing later. The transaction is successful and committed. The user is shown a message saying that their account was created and to check their email for a confirmation link. It's possible in this case that the email is never sent due to some other error, however the user is told that the email has been sent to them. There may be some delay in getting the email sent to the user if application support has to be called in to diagnose the email problem.
NON-TRANSACTIONAL & SYNCHRONOUS
The user is created in the database, but the application gets a timeout error when it tries to send the email with the confirmation link. The user is shown an error message saying that there was an error. The application is slow and unresponsive as it waits for the connection timeout
When the mail server comes back to life and the user tries to register again, they are told their account already exists but has not been confirmed and are given the option of having the email re-sent to them.
NON-TRANSACTIONAL & ASYNCHRONOUS
The only difference between this and transactional & asynchronous is that if there is an error sending the email to the JMS queue or saving it in the database, the user account is still created but the email is never sent until the user attempts to register again.
What I'd like to know is what have other people done here? Can you recommend any other solutions other than the 4 I've mentioned above? What's a reasonable way of approaching this problem? I don't want to over-engineer a system that's dealing with the (hopefully) rare situation where my mail server goes down!
The simplest thing to do is to code it synchronously, but are there any other pitfalls to this approach? I guess I'm wondering if there's a best practice, I couldn't find much out there by googling.
My 2 cents:
Once you have a user sign up, never roll back the registration if sending the E-Mail fails. For simple business reasons: They may not come back or re-register if it doesn't work out at the first try. Rather tolerate an incomplete registration and nag the user to confirm their E-Mail address as soon as possible.
In most cases when sending an E-Mail goes wrong, your app will not get immediate feedback anyway - non-existent E-Mail addresses on valid servers will send back a "undeliverable" message with some delay; if the mail gets eaten by a spam filter, you'll get no feedback at all; in other scenarios, it may take several minutes (greylisting) to several days (mail server temporarily down) for an E-Mail to get delivered. A synchronous approach waiting for the delivery of the mail is therefore doomed IMO. Even an immediate failure (because the user entered a obviously fake address) should never result in the registration getting rolled back.
What I would do is, make account creation as easy as possible, allow the user access to the account before it is confirmed, and then nag the hell out of them to confirm their E-Mail (if necessary, limit access to certain areas until confirmation). I would prevent the creation of a second account with the same E-Mail, though, to prevent clutter.
Make sure you allow changing the E-Mail address even if the previous address hasn't been confirmed yet, and enable the user to re-request the confirmation message to a different address.