I used PHP to mail myself an email that has an attachment invite.ics.
The first few times I sent an email, I DID NOT get the following UI in gmail:
But then after a few more test sends, that UI started showing up for some reason.
I then changed the contents of my invite.ics so that the title changed from John Production Status to James Production Status. WHen I sent myself another email,, gmail displayed the UI with the title John Production Status. But when I downloaded invite.ics, it showed James Production Status.
Why does this happen? And how do I get the UI to reflect the contents of invite.ics?
Ok, i fixed the issue in gmail. Apparently in the contents of my invite.ics, I had to make sure that the field UID had a unique value for each deployment. For some reason, that would force gmail to clear it's "cache".
By changing the UID, you are not clearing any cache but rather are creating a brand new, unrelated event. If gmail is not taking into account new invitations, you may want to increase the SEQUENCE property to indicate that this is a new version of the same event.
Related
I did set up GitLab with the official CE AMI and used the SMTP configuration setup (with AWS SES) as described here. Sending a test mail works without problems. What is not working is receiving mail on notifications (like "new comment" or "merge request").
For example my notification setting is watch(= all notifications). Now I add a new comment and mention myself, everything works fine, my TODO counter (right top) increases but no email is sent. I checked the sidekiq.log file and it says ...
2017-04-24_18:35:38.21211 2017-04-24T18:35:38.212Z 3800 TID-os4gzzujo NewNoteWorker JID-a1f08d6db7451695d6830a6a INFO: start
2017-04-24_18:35:38.29925 2017-04-24T18:35:38.299Z 3800 TID-os4gzzujo NewNoteWorker JID-a1f08d6db7451695d6830a6a INFO: done: 0.087 sec
... but no email is sent. Using grep 'mail' sidekiq.log doesn't yield anything useful either.
I figured it out. The important part is the last sentence on the Notifications help.
You won't receive notifications for Issues, Merge Requests or Milestones created by yourself. You will only receive automatic notifications when somebody else comments or adds changes to the ones that you've created or mentions you.
So when you're setting up GitLab on your own, create another dummy user, then impersonate that user and mention your actual account. That way you will receive an email notification.
I have generated the codes with app script in order to send emails automatically if users changed some values in google spreadsheet, which is working fine.
Now I am sharing my google spreadsheet with the app script to two more person (e.g: PersonA, PersonB). Thus, I want whoever changes anything on google spreadsheet will be sending an email under his/her own account. E.g: [All of us needs to edit within the google spreadsheet itself, without going to the "current web app url", (thanks Cameron Roberts for the clarification] if PersonA changes anything, then an email will be sent out under PersonA's account, and an email will be sent out under PersonB's account if PersonB changes anything.
I did something based on the advice from user2970721 and Cameron Roberts. I adjusted "Deploy web App" as "User accessing the web app". e.g:
I also asked PersonA & PersonB to do the same under their accounts and made sure they have triggered the script at least once. e.g:
My issue is that after I have done all these mentioned above, no matter who changes anything on google spreadsheet, emails were always sent out from PersonB's account (my best guess is that I messed up something and PersonB was the last one who triggered the script).
Does the "Project version" need to be different for me, PersonA, and PersonB, or anything else I need to change? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
First, Your project versions do not need to be different for each user.
I'm assuming you are using the On Change event, rather than a web-app. If that's the case, you should disable the WebApp entirely, as it's not needed.
When PersonA creates an On Change trigger, that will be triggered anytime any user (eg PersonA or PersonB) edits the spreadsheet. When it is triggered the code will execute as PersonA , because PersonA created the trigger. As a result, the email will be sent from PersonA's account.
For the scenario you describe, where both PersonA and PersonB have created OnChange triggers and authorised the script. I would expect emails to be sent from both accounts that have created triggers.
To send only one email, from the account that did the edit, I think you would need to do a check to determine if the user who did the edit matches the user under who's authority the script is running. I've never done this before and the docs don't really make it clear if it's possible.
Try checking the User object (Eg e.user) included with the Change event, and see if that email address is reflecting the different users making the edits.
If it is, you can compare it with the effective user and send the email if they match.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/base/user
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/base/session#getEffectiveUser()
Finally, it might be simpler to just include the address of the person making the edit in your email subject, and just have all the emails send from one account. That way you know who made the edit, but don't need to have every user create a trigger and do all the extra checking.
I'm using rails 2 for this app, with ActionMailer, but this is a general question about emails.
When we send out emails, i save a record corresponding to the email in a database table. I'd like to keep track of whether people have read the emails, and am wondering the best way to do it. On initial googling, it seems like i've stumbled into an ongoing battle between spammers and email clients!
My first thought was to use the "read receipt" header, but i know that this isn't supported by a lot of clients and is therefore unreliable. After that, i read of the tactic of including an image in the mail, and of detecting that image being loaded. I was thinking that i could put a parameter with the email record's id in the image url, so that when i get a request for that image i can see if it has a (for example) email_id param and if so, mark the corresponding email as having been read.
But, then i remembered that many clients are wise to this tactic and specifically ask the viewer of the mail if they want to display images. Obviously they might say no.
Am i right in thinking that i can't pull in other resources, such as stylesheets, in my mail? Because if i can pull them in, i could do that same trick but with the stylesheet rather than an image.
Grateful for any advice, max
Externally-hosted stylesheets are generally treated the same way as images. The client will not download them without prompting the user, if that works at all with HTML-formatted emails.
One thing to consider- you're looking to determine whether the email was read, not necessarily just received, right? Format your email so that it can't be easily read without viewing the images, and include a "view in browser" link at the top. Track image and page-format views and I think you'll have a fairly reliable way to measure actual reads.
Bit late on this, but we've got a similar problem.
We're tracking the links to our site that are included within the email. We're doing this by, like you, having a DB record per email sent out. We've generated a unique hash key per email and are including that as a parameter on all the links included in the email.
We simply then have a before_filter that looks for the parameter and records the fact against the correct email record by using the unique hash to identify the correct one.
We use a unique hash key (rather than the DB's primary key) just so it is a little bit more secure / reliable.
Obviously this method only helps us track the clicks our emails have generated (and not if they've been read) but it is still useful as we can see which of ours users has clicked on which links.
We are having major problems with this as well.
We have task wek portal, where users create tasks (like paint my house) and then we invite painters to give the task creator an price on painting his house.
For that we had a very advanced email system, that sends an invitation and if they accept the invitation we send them the contact info of the task creator.
We need to be able to track if the email was opened, and then once it's opened, we know that the company got the contact info, and we can now send another email to the task creator, telling them that they can expect to be contacted by that company.
The problem is that tracking if the email was opened is not reliable at all. There are different systems for this like msgtag (which does not support a wide range of mail clients like yahoo and other major clients) and our email API client (elastic email) even offer some API call back functions to tell us if each email was opened or bounced or whatever. But again, it's not reliable. To track if it's open, elastic email just includes a 1x1 px image and track if it's opened. So if people don't click "show images in this email" it's not tracked as opened.
So basically we are down to two options.
Have vital portions of the content printed on images, that they have to view to get the info we want to track if they got (in this case contact info)
Just have a link in the email "click here to get the contact info" and then track if that is clicked.
So in conclusion, the "track if opened" is totally useless and unreliable, unless you can fully control which email clients your recipients are using and how they are using them (like if they are all your employees or something).
I am using a salesforce workflow to send out product information and invoices to clients but I am running into problems thinking of how to verify if a client receives the email and or opens it. Is there any way to prove that a client received my inventory list or invoice? Doing some prior research on this subject I have come across the following suggestions:
Adding a 1x1 invisible image to the email with a unique id
Adding a regular image instead of a 1x1, maybe company logo
Having the recipient click a link to see the invoice
With all these solutions, you have to detect image requests or link request for them and extract/produce a unique id for each client. I am not really sure how to do this in salesforce so any help would be appreciated, along with other detection ideas.
If you have Salesforce Content, there are some ways to expose documents to clients with the features you need. Basically you'll send an email with link and later you can track confirmation of opening, count how many times was it downloaded.. You can also set the expiration date to the document (can't be downloaded anymore after the date).
As for "pure" email from Apex/Visualforce and basically manually recreating the Content's functionality... nowadays most mail clients block external pictures unless explicitly allowed by the mail recipient, so I suspect you'll have poor track of emails marked as opened. Probably you could create a small Visualforce page (no header, no styles, just controller that makes update "invoice viewed" in the database). Display image from Documents on this page (make sure it's "externally available image") or even just display 1 pixel encoded in base64...
So, 'Litmus', a web app for testing emails and webpages across browsers and email clients, has a proprietary method that they claim is able to track not just opens, clicks, browsers, etc (standard with an embedded image and pass-through link tracking.)
What's unique is they claim that they are able to track what actions the end user took, how long the end user read it for, and if they deleted or forwarded the email. They claim they do this without JavaScript, and purely using embedded images. They claim that the method works across most major email clients.
What could they be doing to track this? Obviously, if they're doing it with third party applications that they don't control, whatever they are doing should be replicable.
I'm thinking that they realized that when an email client forwards or deletes an email, it 'opens' the email in a different way then normal, creating a unique user string on the server log of some kind? I'm grasping at strings, though.
http://litmusapp.com/email-analytics
Details here http://litmusapp.com/help/analytics/how-it-works
EDIT: It also looks like they track Prints. Maybe they do this by tracking calls to the 'print' css?
It's all done with good ol' image bugs. Breaking down how they find out...
Which client was used: Check the user-agent
Whether an email was forwarded: Done by attaching image bugs to divs that are loaded only when the message is forwarded.
Whether an email was printed: bug attached to print stylesheet
How long it takes to read an email: A connection that's kept open, as pointed out by Forrest (this is also how Facebook tracks(ed?) whether or not you are online on chat).
Whether an email was deleted: Check If a message was read for a short period of time or not opened. In fact, they group "glanced" and "deleted" together.
Of course none of this will work if email clients disable images in emails.
EDIT: Here's another question on this:
The OP actually has their tracking code, and this answer here explains how it works.
One way I can think of doing that is having an embedded image that loads from a script on a server. The script would not return anything or maybe send data really slowly to keep the connection open. Once the email is deleted the connection would be closed. This way they could know how long the email was open. Maybe they just assume if it's open for less than 10 seconds it was deleted?
Another way is tracking the referrer - this would give a lot of data on what a webmail client is doing, but I doubt it would be useful with a desktop client.
They know when the email is opened (it's when the image is called from their http server).
They also know what the user do and when since they can easily replace all links with their own tracking URLs redirecting to the original link.
There is nothing exceptional here. They are just a bit more advanced than their compatitors. There is no magic.
I have only one doubt: how they track delete. Technically, there is no way to know what happened to the message after it was read.
I suspect that a "deleted" mail is a mail that is never opened.