I assure you this is a programming question: someone asked about this same problem before and was told that this is not a programming question, but that is because he did not phrase it as such. Please read my full description.
The Problem: I just graduated from college and want to transfer all my emails in my college account (henceforth "account O" for old) to a regular gmail account (henceforth N). Note that account O is powered by Gmail, and is effectively a gmail account.
Gmail has a suggested means for doing this: POP/IMAP. But, this did not work for me, and it has failed many others (see here); upon trying to sync by IMAP, my account N is bombarded with messages reading "A message in your account was listed with an invalid size. It has been left on the server."
It would seem natural to try to mass-forward all of one's emails. But google does not allow such an action. Other people say to use a filter, because filtered items can be mass-forwarded. But you can't filter by date, and there is no way to get the filter to select everything.
My workaround, and where I need more experience programmer advice: I want to run a program which signs into my account O and finds the first email I ever received. Then, I want to begin a for loop which runs through all of my emails where the body of the loop does the following: a) click the forward button b) type in my account N email address c) hit "next", so that the 2nd email I ever received shows up, and so on.
This would accomplish my task.
Unfortunately, all I have under my belt is a semester of C++, some knowledge of statistical
scripting languages (ie R), and VBA. I don't know how to make code interact with the internet. Could someone tell me a language and how to do this?
Thanks,
Ryan
While you are correct in saying that the approach you want to take to this problem makes it a programming question, Ben makes a valid point that your question probably does not confirm to site guidelines.
To answer your problem, pretty much any language should be able to handle this, as nearly all have libraries for working with SMTP. However, this is most likely overkill and I would not suggest programming your own solution when other alternatives exist.
If you receive that message when trying to import mail (or add an account) in gmail's web interface, you should try to import them using an actual mail client such as Thunderbird, a procedure for which is described here. If you have already tried that but still encounter errors, you can use GMail Loader to read archive emails from a variety of formats and mass forward them to a gmail address.
Yes it is possible to create a filter that selects everything.
Simply put your email in the "to" field.
If you have other accounts forwarding to O, make a filter for them too (or us the "OR" keyword).
Related
I feel really stupid asking this question, but I recently signed up to a GNU mailman list for the first time ever and can't quite figure out how to interact with it properly. I can't find any documentation anywhere on how to participate as a list member. In particular, I am trying to figure out how to make my responses nest properly when replying from a Gmail account. Through some sparse info I've gleaned, I found that the "In-Reply-To" header is supposedly the one that determines where your message nests on the list.
So, I posted a new message to the list, and when somebody replied to me, I received a copy in my Gmail in addition to the post on the list archives page. I replied to the Gmail and addressed it back to the main list address. After sending, I examined the Gmail headers, and In-Reply-To was indeed set to the Message-ID of the person who had replied to me, so I thought my response would be nested under his. Unfortunately, it was not. It was nested underneath my own OP, next to his. I can't figure out why, except that there is another header References, which in my response, included two Message-ID's, both the one from my original post, and the one from the first response.
None of this stuff is intuitive at all or explained anywhere that I can find, and Gmail of course gives you no control of email headers... but I don't want to switch to an entirely new mail service just to interact with a Mailman list. Nor do I want to spam a real list with a bunch of stupid test messages of me figuring out what is probably supposed to be a very simple system. Does anybody know of a test instance of mailman somewhere that I can send a few mails to just so get this all sorted out? I found what appeared to be a couple, but none of them were actually accepting mail.
I got a request from my client that they want to add stars (★) to their email subject (They send these mails through the application we made as a part of bigger CRM for them).
I tried to send a test mail, and the email title is displayed nicely in my Gmail account, and I must agree with my client that it is eye catching, but what came to my mind is that this may be a spam magnet, so I googled about it but I can't find the actual "don't do this".
Generaly, my oppinion would be not to use it, but now I have to explain to the client why. My best explanation whould be there is a probability your emails will be treated as spam but I don't have the background for this statement.
Do you have any suggestions about what should I do?
The only information I could find is on the SpamAssassin page of how to avoid false positives. The only relevant part I found was this part.
Do not use "cute" spellings, Don't S.P.A.C.E out your words, don't put
str#nge |etters 0r characters into your emails.
SpamAssassin is a very widely used spam filtering tool. However, simply breaking one of the rules (strange characters) alone wouldn't get an email marked as spam. But combined with some other problems could lead to your email being considered spam. That being said, if your email is a completely legitimate business email, it's likely that few other rules are triggered, and using the special characters wouldn't create a huge problem. That being said, you should probably try out a couple test emails on SpamAssassin and a couple other spam filtering tools in order to come to a better conclusion on the emails you plan to send out.
Simply explain to your client as you have explained to SO: you stated that the star made it eye catching: this doesn't directly mean that it will be treated as spam, but you could explain how that concept COULD be considered spam.
If the star is part of their branding, however, this could be quite a nice way in which your client expresses themselves.
Spam emails are becoming more and more like what one would consider 'normal', so I think they have trial it internally, test the concept.
Talk it over with your client - there is going to be no basis in hard fact with things like this, purely social perception.
More and more retailers are using unicode symbols in their subject lines since a few months. Of course it's in order to gain more attention in cluttered inboxes. Until now, there has been absolutely no evidence that such symbols increase the likelihood of failing spam filter tests. However, keep in mind that rare symbols might not render (correctly) across all mail user agents. Especially keep an eye on Android and Blackberry smartphones, but also on Outlook. In addition, due to a Hotmail bug symbols will render much bigger in subect lines and in the email body within the web front end. In fact, they are beeing replaced by images. All in all, the star shouldn't make any problems. At least, if it's encoded correctly in the subject line. So, go for it.
for my group at the university I'd like to set up a server-sided email-to-rss service.
It should work like that, that different people can send emails to a certain address (nothing proprietary like gmail but a certain imap or pop server) which will the be translated into an rss feed. One main and important feature has to be that one can see the sender of the email in the feed. Furthermore it would be nice (to take the load off the server) if the emails get translated to a feed only once a day or so.
Does anyone has some input on this subject? Are there any scripts/services which will allow that?
Thanks a bunch.
Instead of "reinventing the wheel", you could use a mailing list that supports RSS. Your people can then write the mails to the mailing list and you can then use the mailing list's RSS feed however you intend to.
This should help you find a solution: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=mailing%20list%20rss
Pick a programming language you're familiar with, then use either an imap library to fetch the E-mails (through cron, every hour or something like that), or if you have access to procmail on your mail server, launch your script as an email arrives (this shouldn't be too much work to handle for a server, unless you're talking a vast amount of E-mail).
The script would just insert the E-mails into a database, before extracting them and outputting the RSS-feed directly from that (this shouldn't be more than a handful of lines of code).
There's a couple of providers that does this for you, although it seems that the most popular ones have disappeared. Advanced Email2RSS seems to be an option, although I have no idea how good they are or if it'll even solve your issue.
I was wondering, is it really worth the trouble to implement email-obfuscation techniques in order to prevent emails from being harvested these days? My initial thought is no but i might be wrong. My (possibly inaccurate) arguments:
spam filtering and detection is superior these days (when looking at my gmail spambox over 90% of all mail i receive is spam but none ends up in my inbox). Is it safe to assume the same for most other email services?
most techniques aren't 100% proof against advanced harvesting scripts so all effort could be in vain.
You might argue that it's no trouble to obfuscate an e-mail address but i notice a lot of our clients enter their e-mail addresses through our CMS which thus requires me to filter out the e-mail adresses from the text and replace it with an obfuscated version which obviously is a little more trouble.
I'd like to hear from other people wondering the same or actually proving me wrong :)
If it's your address, you can do whatever you see fit.
If it's not your address, you might want to ask the owners. (Or check DNS to see if it's hosted on Google Apps)
As I described here, it is possible to block even the most advanced harvesters. (Unless they specifically target your site and work with the script)
We're programming a Testing Web Application for a University in ColdFusion with a MS SQL Backend.
Right now we have to manually take faxes sent to our fax machine and then find the account they are related to and input the info (the actual fax has to be found in a filing cabinet if we ever need to reference it again). What I would like to do is create a way for someone to fax to a certain number and then the fax be sent to an email account we specify.
If that worked properly we would need a way to get the email, store it somewhere on our servers and then link it to an account. The linking process would probably have to be manual and we are ok with that, but an easy way to view all the faxes sent to that email in our ColdFusion application in PDF form (searchable by the name we assign it) is what we are mainly looking for, so that we don't have to get the faxes on paper and file them by hand.
Is there a way to accomplish this? Preferably not through a paid service as we can program almost anything we need ourselves.
Hmm... have you tried services like eFax?
Why reinvent the wheel? Services like eFax and jConnect (there are several others, just Google "electronic fax service") are affordable and do half of what you are trying to do. Save yourself the effort and just spend a few bucks. You'll probably find out, too, that it will cost you less to just pay for the service than it would cost you to pay the developer to write the software.
So after you bite the bullet and sign up for an electronic faxing service, you just need an email account for it to send to, and to use CFPOP to check the inbox and download the attachments. The rest is a piece of cake.
From the sounds of it, I have built something identical to this faxing setup with Coldfusion.
After a few trials and errors I found best way to go is:
1) DIGITIZE INCOMING FAXES: Have all faxes either sent to an email address you can check via CF, or a network folder you save them on, which you can check with CF. You can absolutely keep your fax number and simply call forward incoming calls to your digital fax number.
2) PROCESS INCOMING FAXES When you find a new fax, it is best to process it and make a record of it. I store things like the file name, dig up the fax number it came from, check it against a list of known numbers, and have a routing table (in case it needs to go to someone).
3) PRINT AND ROUTE FAX Auto printing a document once in CF is possible via CF as well.
As for tables, I keep one to store each fax. I store the fax itself in a blob as well. Easy to replicate and move around, no big performance hit. I keep another table to store a list of incoming number profiles (like a caller ID table) to relate the number to a customer. I keep a table for routing rules, if an email comes from here, send it here. Last, but not least, if you have to manage multiple phone numbers, you can create multiple incoming profiles and file them.
Once you have each fax stored in the DB, you can do a lot with it and file/index/ store it digitally how you like. CFDOCUMENT will display disk based PDFs.
I ended up having to program something like this for custom routing options. It is possible to auto link items to certain files/folders/projects if you like as well with CF.
If you need to know anything else, ask, or we can discuss it off line if you need to keep some details private.
Agree with Adam. Don't create a bunch of problems for yourself - you'll save a lot of money and nerves by just using the existing service.
On the topic: I use Popfax and I kind of like it. It's comfy, gives you opportunities, discounts, contests and a lot of stuff you'd like if you'd be interested in. It's cheap (at least, 100% cheaper than your own software) and you can use it not only on PC, but also via mobile phone