Our mountain bike club has a blogger site. We send out lots of emails about group rides, trail work, etc. I would like to be able to keep our mailing list up to date. I was thinking about adding a form for people to subscribe to the email list, and a link in the emails to unsubscribe.
Everything I have found about mailing list subscription is to send an email each time there is a post to the blog, but I want to just add it to a group that we could use to send emails. Maybe add the emails to a text file or google group and when you click on the email link it opens a new email to that group. What is the best way to make that happen?
I found a solution for what I was trying to do. I created a Google Group and sent everyone invitations to join the group. So far it seems to work fine.
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I have an app which sends a daily reminder message. If a user forgets to log in on certain days, it will send an email reminder. I want users to be able to unsubscribe to this reminder by clicking a link on the email. There may also be different kinds of subscription. For example, a user might not want daily emails, but they may want password reset, or blog emails.
Mailgun has an unsubscribe feature. While this allows some control with tags, this seems to lack a resubscription option. They also have a mailing list, but that also seems more for blasting emails rather than opting in to notifications.
One option is to connect the email to my database. So that when the user clicks an unsubscribe link, it will flip a flag in my database such that the user isn't contacted regarding this email. But I can't find a way to do this, that doesn't involve giving the user an API link on the emails.
What are some options I can do to solve this?
You probably would be able to accomplish this using Mailgun mailing lists (but I wouldn't for reasons below). You'd have to maintain a list for each type of email that you want to send to users. So when you add/delete users from your system you'll have to use the API or control panel to add/remove from each of the lists. Mailgun can generate a unique unsubscribe url for each of the lists so that when the user hits unsubscribe from the email it will flag the email as unsubscribed for that one list.
From Mailgun docs:
For managing unsubscribes in Mailing Lists, you can use
%mailing_list_unsubscribe_url%. We will generate the unique link to
unsubscribe from the mailing list. Once a recipient clicks on the
unsubscribe link, we mark the recipient as “unsubscribed” from this
list and they won’t get any further emails addressed to this list.
Mailing lists should work unless I don't understand your requirement.
From my point of view I'd just prefer to handle this inside my own system. Otherwise you have to maintain your application's user records and then a separate mailgun list for each email type. In multiple applications I have user email preferences stored in the db. The user (or customer admin login) can adjust preferences through the UI or in some cases by hitting unsubscribe link in an email which links to a web page (part of my app) "You have now unsubscribed to daily emails" -- the page sets the user as unsubscribed in my app DB.
Its extra work but the advantages to handling this in your app is:
You've only got one user DB (list) to maintain
List membership is easier to modify by the app user or app user account manager
It doesn't tie you as tightly to Mailgun -- in case you decide to
choose another provider
More on Mailgun Mailing lists:
https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/user_manual.html#mailing-lists
Background: I'm currently trying to use the Gmail Inbox Feed (https://developers.google.com/gmail/gmail_inbox_feed) in my browser automation script in order to defeat 2-factor authentication. I'm working as a tester and want to bypass the profile creation to get to testing the actual bugs quicker. Basically my script tries to log into my website that has 2-factor authentication, then it gets the latest email using the feed and looks for the token that the website sends.
My problem is that it seems like the feed is only showing the oldest email from each conversation. It doesn't show new emails. That won't work for me since my script will trigger a bunch of these emails and they all get grouped into one conversation. And I need the latest email since that is the one that has the token. Curiously, the <issued> tag shows the date and time of the newest email even though the email in that containing <entry> tag is an old one.
If you want to reproduce this problem yourself: send an email to yourself, then reply to that email with a different message so that both emails show up in the same conversation. Then mark them both as unread by clicking the dropdown arrow on the oldest email and then clicking "Mark unread from here". If you go to the feed URL above, it will only show the first email you sent to yourself.
Is there a setting or parameter that I can set in order for the feed to show all latest emails? Or at least the newest email in each conversation?
I tried turning "Conversation View" off at Settings > General but that didn't solve my problem.
I am a bit confused with Mailchimp and Mandrill, what I need to do seems to need both, let me explain:
A social network needs to send at 1am everyday a notification email to their users that have not logged in during the last 24 hours. Emails have to be personalised.
On the top of that, there are different campaigns for different list of users.
My first thought is to use the mandrill API, but I need to be able to see who unsubscribe from what campaign (a user might want to unsubscribe to one campaign but stay subscribed on another one). I cannot seem to find something that fits the bill with Mandrill... Subaccount? Tags?
Thanks!
I'm not 100% sure this will answer the question, but let me try:
Mandrill actually belongs to MailChimp, and was created for interfacing with it. You can use the "mandrill-api" gem - https://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/ - to interface with many of the Mandrill and MailChimp features to do the things you wanted.
A lot of times if you are attempting to do so, and run into errors such as "XXXX not found", you have to send it FROM MailChimp TO Mandrill. For instance, when you create a template in MailChimp, click the dropdown menu next to the template, and click "Send to Mandrill". You should be good from there.
Other than that, I wish you luck. While the mandrill-api gem can do everything, it has absolutely abysmal documentation. There are multiple third-party gems that provide similar functions (mandrill-rails is a popular one) that you might have better luck with, but I have not used them myself.
Notifications = Mandrill = 1:1 emails
Campaigns = MailChimp = 1:many emails
Typically, notifications are 1:1 emails - your system sends a single user an email as a result of some trigger within the system. The trigger might match multiple users at the same time, but emails are sent to them each individually - probably via a loop in your code. Mandrill supports templates to personalise these emails if required.
Campaigns are sent to mailing list members in bulk, where the same (personalised) email is sent to multiple users at the same time. This is either triggered by hand (you manually create and send a campaign) or is based on a scheduled trigger (eg autoresponders or scheduled campaign mailing).
Notifications are generally system-related emails and while you do have the technical ability to let users unsubscribe from them in Mandrill, typically I would consider that a configuration option you'd give them in their personal control panel on your site.
Campaigns are something you MUST allow users to unsubscribe from to comply with anti-spam laws, so will contain unsubscribe links in the footer of every email.
I am setting up a blog using Blogger that needs to remain private. I understand that a private blog cannot have an RSS feed or use feedburner for email notifications.
I am wondering what other options I have for users to receive an email notification of new posts on the blog. I found a site suggesting that I could set up a Google group and use the email address for the group to send posts out to users, but I tried this and no email was sent out, i.e. I added the email address for the Google group to Settings/Mobile and Email/Email Posts to in Blogger, but the members of the Google group didn't receive an email.
I am wondering if there are other options?
1.Sign in to Blogger
2.Click on your Blog Name
3.Click on Settings
4.Click on Mobile and Email
5.On the bottom click on Add,where it says Email posts to
6.Type the Email Address
7.On the top left,click on "Save Settings"
8.Create a new post and it shall take less than 48 hours for the email alert
Create a group in Google and let anywone post to it (but not to read).
Then configure Blogger to send email message to this group.
In this way you can add more than 10 users (blogger limit)
I am new to website designing and wanted to know couple of things.
when some clicks on the link on my website say www.google.com, can i trace that how many people clicked on it.
When i send out emails with attachments, can i record how many people opened those attachements. btw this is not yahoo or gmail, its my personal email with an ISP.
if so, please put references so i can read them or explanation if possible
Create the links on your website so that they do a GET to your website first, and then redirect to the desired website.
Click here
The email attachment is a different problem. If you send an email that reads the attachment from your website, you can record the traffic.
For tracking outbound clicks, services like Google Analytics can wrap every link on your site with JavaScript and provide statistics and sexy graphs.
For tracking email attachments, it depends on the attachment. Static files like images can't make callbacks to the Internet, but something like a PDF with embedded JavaScript might be able to.
As for links within the emails, you can make each link in each email unique by associating a token with each email recipient, e.g. Some Link. Store the token in a database along with the recipient's email address and later you can cross-reference hits on your site with emails you sent out.
I know there are a handful services that do the latter, but I can't name any offhand. Search for "email newsletter service."