For a couple of days now I've been searching for a solution that integrates ongoing work item communication over email into a specific work item's history.
For example once a ticket is created, if a specific TFS email account is included in email correspondence related to a specific ticket, some service would parse the TFS email account, read the email contents and attach the conversation to the work item. I've seen other ticketing systems support similar functionality.
The major problem I'm trying to solve here is to increase productivity by automatically keeping all tickets in sync with related conversations without user intervention.
Does anyone know of any commercial or open source products that can support this functionality?
I just implemented a cloud service using SendGrid that accepts emails at [workitemid]#mycloudservice.com and appends the email to the History of the work item. So if you forward an email to 1234#mycouldservice.com, the email date/subject/body is appended to the History of work item ID 1234.
Right now I have a lot of things hard-coded to my personal usage, but I'm thinking of making it generic/configurable for public usage. The big caveat is that the TFS server needs to be internet-visible (works great with Team Foundation Service). I'll update this answer when(if) I open it up for general usage. The code that handles the SendGrid POST is here if you're interested.
There is also the TeamCompanion Outlook add-in, that gives you a button in the ribbon to attach the current email to a work item. The last round I went with TeamCompanion I found it OK, but a bit buggy, and it may have slowed Outlook down (or that could have been psychological).
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I set up new automation.
Created email templates with personalized tokens, added these tokens in my CSV file.
Uploaded CVS contacts with personalization tokens (created new separate contact list).
Connected uploaded contact list to new automation.
Set up automation "LIVE".
RESULT: system assigned new contacts/emails to the old templates/automation which I didn't have intent to use.
Also was weird, in old templates/automation were similar tokens {firs name}, {company} {line} but they weren't applied, only DEFAUL appeared instead of these tokens. Could you please help me understand how did it happen and avoid it in the future.
My goal is to use SendGrid in cold email outreach where I am going to create 2-3 new automations per week. I am using plain text in builder. Can you please show me the way to do it without mess I described above.
When I send emails using SendGrid automation these emails doesn't appear in my Inbox "Sent" folder.
Can you also help me to fix that
I don't what I need to try to fix that
I receive emails from a couple of Azure DevOps environments, my company system and a suppliers system. I had rules for the email notifications to move them based on the From address, which was different. Now all the emails come from azuredevops#microsoft.com.
Does anyone know if there is any way to easily distinguish where the email has come from ?
Is it possible to change the From address used by DevOps? I don't believe it is possible to customise the body, and basing the filter on the body is too much maintenance
Thanks in advance
Is it possible to change the From address used by DevOps?
The answer is No. The notification from could not be modified by users.
But, I can get what you are suffering. While have the notification emails comes from several organizations, its too messy to know exactly where they come from.
Now, for build or release notification emails, you can create filter subject rules to distinguish them. Because in the subject of email which about build or release, it contains the info of organization name.
But, unfortunately, until now, the org info just displayed in build and release notification. And also you could not customize the email content of notification.
You can raise the demand to Microsoft Developer Community, follow and vote it.
When there are enough communities vote and add comments for this feedback, the product team member will take this feedback seriously.
I have found a work around in order to filter my emails, in case anyone else has the same issue.
The emails contain links to take you to the work item or other DevOps page that the email is related to. I've been able to create a filter based on the Url that the link is pointing to, so I'm looking for the specific DevOps URL in the Body of the message, as filing the email based on that. It seems to work for my requirements at least.
Does SendGrid support double opt-in to Lists as a feature or is that something we will have to implement for ourselves?
https://sendgrid.api-docs.io/v3.0/contacts-api-recipients/add-recipients
It doesn't appear to me to be anywhere in the docs, but I thought I'd ask in case I missed it.
Not as of the current date; I asked their support staff and received the following answer:
Double opt-in needs to be implemented by you in the form/page you're subscribing your recipients. The confirmation email can be sent through SendGrid.
For Marketing Campaigns we have the SendGrid’s WordPress Subscription Widget that makes it easy for people visiting your WordPress site to subscribe to your marketing emails;
or Building a SendGrid Subscription Widget.
I got this answer from their support. It turns out we have to implement it by ourselves.
The double opt-in functionality is not something SendGrid provides as
we expect our customers to handle any opt-in practices on their side.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
SendGrid will be GDPR compliant by May, 25, 2018. Please note that
SendGrid does not – and does not currently have plans to – use servers
or data centers in the European Union to process email. Thus, SendGrid
cannot restrict data to the EU. However, neither current EU law nor
the GDPR require this. Instead, what is required is that SendGrid must
provide "appropriate safeguards" for data that it hosts and processes
on its US servers (see Art 46 of the GDPR here). SendGrid offers a
Data Processing Addendum (DPA) to provide such adequate safeguards,
which includes provisions for when GDPR goes into effect.
More info on GDPR can be found here. Our DPA can be reviewed and
signed by filling out the information here.
They do not support it. I asked support many times, which is a strange as it would seem a company of that size could spare the dev resources to build a feature that literally all of their customers need.
However, https://sgwidget.com is a third party product that provides double opt in functionality for Sendgrid accounts.
Full Disclosure: I am a developer at SG Widget.
No, indeed still today, they do not. Not in their forms, nor in their API is there simple, flip-switchable support for double opt-in. But, with email automation fairly recently implemented in their marketing services ("free" and "advanced" plans, not "essential") you can send an automated email directly upon sign-up.
My solution is to have 2 lists for new contacts, where one is a "pre-confirmation" list and the other being the "real" list. Here´s a way to use automation:
Create initial signup form, either via their sparse Web forms or via your own, using HTML/JS/PHP and API endpoint:
Create 2 separate lists, one for "pre-confirmation" emails and the other for people who confirm their addresses.
Make the form sign up new contacts to the first list, "pre-confirmation".
Create a marketing automation flow that triggers upon new signups to the "pre-confirmation" list. Make the automation trigger an email that contains a button or a link with the following link structure:
https://yoursite.com?email=user#email.com&passphrase=[phrase-you-set-manually]
where ?email= is your user´s email, substitute this in the email template/design by {{ Sender_Email }}
where &passphrase= is a phrase long enough to not be guessed. Since you only have one single email design here, and you can only enter one single phrase, unless you make a script or a hash, you make it difficult enough for people to think it was generated by a server :).
On your server/application, yoursite.com, use $_POST['email'] and $_POST['passphrase'], or whatever you name them, to validate the email clicks from your list and then enter all validated emails to the correct list using the PUT
/marketing/contacts endpoint.
you may also have to delete the user from the previous list, using DELETE
/marketing/lists/{id}/contacts, but I do think that the PUT /marketing/contacts takes care of placing the contact in only the lists specified in the list_ids field.
once the contact has been entered into the correct list, you can also have a marketing automation set up for that list, which sends him/her a welcome message.
This method takes care of double opt-in for SendGrid without using one single email credit from the Email API (transactional plan). The only catch is that we utilize one initial and one second/final list to achieve it.
Note: the initial sign-up message that here acts as the "confirm your email" message, will be tied to the first list and will require a marketing unsubscribe link in the footer. Make it clear in the bottom of the email that it is a temporary list, to not get any spam complaints. But it will not be an issue, as we wont be sending to anyone in that list except for this initial time. Unless you have a user who enters his/her email twice, after some time of inactivity when they forgot they already signed up. That could happen. But it´s a separate issue.
I think this is possible by switching the flow of a typical email subscriber. When the user clicks your subscribe button, instead of calling the sendgrid members/contact PUT api to add to your list, send an email with a link to a URL of yours that will then trigger the members/contact PUT api call.
Not sure what stack you are using but I was able to build something like this with next.js utilizing their api routes
I work for a large company, which uses MS Exchange for Email. We have a distribution list for people to post questions, where anyone can answer. I am looking for a way to maintain a copy of this distribution list so that anyone can search it. Ideally, this would be searchable from within Outlook as well as by going to a webpage, but I will take either one. Someone has proposed to create a dummy email account, which just gets the distribution list traffic. Everyone interested in this distribution list could then attach this account. While this may work, there are several challenges with this approach:
1) It becomes problematic when you have several hundred people attaching a single email Inbox/account.
2). I need this account to be read-only, so someone doesn't accidentally delete an email from this account, thinking that it is in their personal account.
3). Our company has an auto-archive policy. This account would need to be exempt from that policy.
Any ideas?
Thanks
GS
The dummy mailbox is not a bad idea. You can give the people appropiate permissions to the Inbox folder of that mailbox.
To work around the permission issue you could either
1) create a transport agent which monitors the mailflow and dumps all messages to a database or CMS/SharePoint/whatever.
2) Create the dummy mailbox and setup a service which monitors this mailbox using push/pull/streaming notifications and dump the messages to a database/CMS/SharePoint/whatever.
The SharePoint solution would make the search option a piece of cake. But if you don't already have a SharePoint instance up and running this might be overkill.
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).