Although Apple doesn't allow apps to send text messages without explicit user permission (unlike Android, which just requires you to ask for permissions like this when installing the app), I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for other ways to get around this issue. Specifically:
Is it possible to allow the user to pre-approve a specific text message, and delay sending it until the desired time?
Can an external client be used? Ex., ping a server to do the work of sending the text message for the user? This seems like it will get ugly quickly though (since provider info is required), and would require the user to have internet access, not just cell signal. However, perhaps the application can require an initialization text.
The goal here is to send a specific text message for the user when they are unable to do so themselves, so naturally, having them pre-approve the message would be impossible.
You can't send text messages directly from the device.
But I think there is no problem sending them from a webserver, however your app needs to have an internet connection to do this and I am not aware of a service, which allows you to send text messages for free, so you need to pay to provide this service to your users (I can't say if it is ok for Apple to charge your users for such a service). Another drawback of this solution is, that the sender of the text message wouldn't probably be the users number.
Related
As the title says, I would like to know if there is any way to send emails without having to use an external service, that charges me for sending the messages, or having to use an SMTP server in which each user has to be registered.
I have also seen pages like email.js but I don't want to have to pay for that if there is a possibility to do it on my own. It is also not useful for me to open the Gmail or messaging application of the device itself since I already know how to do that and it is not what I want.
For better understanding, I will give an example of what I want to do.
What I want is that from my application the user writes a message and from there that email message is sent to several different users from a list, without having to log in or anything, since the emails will be sent from my own email account. gmail that I have specifically created for the application.
I have seen the smtp server but from the information that I have seen that server implies that I have to log in to be able to have the token and that is not what I want because I want that once I configure everything there is no need to do anything else that people receive your messages and that's it.
I don't know if this is possible but I hope someone can help me.
Sending emails without your user logging in would require you to have either the credentials stored in the app (which is unsafe) or use a custom backend server that will host all the credentials that cannot be extracted. I would advise going with the backend route because it is easier to setup and your application will simply perform a HTTP request to get it done.
From the documentation of the mailer package, you can implement the server method pretty easily and get it moving. You will have to find a free web hosting service to deploy to.
There would really be otherwise no other way to get what you desire for virtually free.
Was hoping for some ideas as to a service to which I can set up an inbound-only email system. In other words, I will have multiple users on the system, each can receive their own email... but at the moment... at this time, I am not focused on the ability to send or reply to messages, only receive them and send to the appropriate user. I looked into Postmark... They seem to have some great functionality.
CloudMailin Is another alternative. However there are effectively three options for setting up something like this.
Use an existing, traditional, email server and poll for the emails
Setup your own email server and create a script to run when you receive an email
Use a third party solution, as you've already mentioned.
I went through for of these for Rails a little while back here, but all the information is still relevant.
I need to be able to display ads on email forwarded through a server (preferably postfix) based on the demographic information of the recipient. Basically a message will arrive for someuser#fakedomain.com and be forwarded to realuser#theirdomain.com with a small advertisement at the bottom.
I would like to use postfix because it appears to be able to use mysql data for various tasks, which would be beneficial so that the system could be controlled by a web app that feeds the database.
I'd prefer to use OpenX for the ad server due to targetting channels (used to select ads based on demographic information), the ability to do text ads as well as email zones, and the ability to run it locally. Other ad servers that are better suited to this problem are acceptable, of course.
The core of the problem, as I see it, is being able to write something at the bottom of any given email message. Of course html messages make this even trickier, but I'd settle for having a solution that works for plain text and work up from there.
Commercial software is an option as well, but a few days of intermittent searching hasn't turned anything up.
Simply writing something to the bottom of the email message will fail miserably in a LOT of cases, particularly with HTML email encapsulated in a MIME multipart message (or anything else in a MIME multipart message) because anything after the last MIME section marker is explicitly supposed to be ignored by any MIME parser. If you want your app to work it needs to
determine if the target message is a MIME message other than TEXT/PLAIN
If it is not, append your text only ad at the end and you're done
if it is, determine if its multipart
if not, then you need to determine the content type of the whole message
If the content type is HTML then you can attempt to insert your ad HTML somewhere appropriate. This will be very hit or miss since you have no idea what the HTML layout will be like.
if the content type is anything OTHER than HTML (or maybe RTF), you're best off not touching the message.
If the message is multipart, determine the subtype
if its 'mixed', then you need to determine which part if any is the primary readable content, and then modify that portion as if it were the whole message based on the above rules
If its 'alternative' then you need to find ALL the readable portions and modify each of them in turn according to the above rules
Finally, and most importantly
Be prepared for the massive ill will you will receive from everyone who gets mail routed through your server.
Let me see... People sign up for your service, which I assume is free. They provide you their real email address and in return you provide them a different email address which they can use to e.g. subscribe to mailinglists and for other services. And maybe some spamfilter functionality? That sounds like a legit service to me, especially if you only provide the ads to the person who subscribed. I do wonder if you'd get many subscriptions, though, since many people can just as easy use a Google, Yahoo or Hotmail account for these purposes. So, what is the added value those subscribers will get?
Anyway, you would need to modify existing emails, which is a bit complex when they are HTML mails or if they're digitally signed. (Especially in the latter case, you would actually block the recipient from receiving those emails, since their email system would detect that the email has been tampered with. You might also be at risk of possible legal problems, although I don't think there's anything illegal as long as the recipient agrees with the terms of your service.
A number of applications have the handy feature of allowing users to respond to notification emails from the application. The responses are slurped back into the application.
For example, if you were building a customer support system the email would likely contain some token to link the response back to the correct service ticket.
What are some guidelines, hints and tips for implementing this type of system? What are some potential pitfalls to be aware of? Hopefully those who have implemented systems like this can share their wisdom.
Some guidelines and considerations:
The address question: The best thing to do is to use the "+" extension part of an email (myaddr**+custom**#gmail.com) address. This makes it easier to route, but most of all, easier to keep track of the address routing to your system. Other techniques might use a token in the subject
Spam: Do spam processing outside the app, and have the app filter based on a header.
Queuing failed messages: Don't, for the most part. The standard email behavior is to try for up to 3 days to deliver a message. For an application email server, all this does is create giant spool files of mail you'll most likely never process. Only queue messages if the failure reasons are out of your control (e.g., server is down).
Invalid message handling: There are a multiple of ways a message can be invalid. Some are limitations of the library (it can't parse the address, even though its an RFC valid one). Others are because of broken clients (e.g., omitting quotes around certain headers). Other's might be too large, or use an unknown encoding, be missing critical headers, have multiple values where there should only be one, violate some semantic specific to your application, etc, etc, etc. Basically, where ever the Java mail API could throw an exception is an error handling case you must determine how to appropriately handle.
Error responses: Not every error deserves a response. Some are generated because of spam, and you should avoid sending messages back to those addresses. Others are from automated systems (yourself, a vacation responder, another application mail system, etc), and if you reply, it'll send you another message, repeating the cycle.
Client-specific hacks: like above, each client has little differences that'll complicate your code. Keep this in mind anytime you traverse the structure of a message.
Senders, replies, and loops: Depending on your situation, you might receive mail from some of the following sources:
Real people, maybe from external sources
Mailing lists
Yourself, or one of your own recipient addresses
Other mail servers (bounces, failures, etc)
Entity in another system (my-ldap-group#company.com, system-monitor#localhost)
An automated system
An alias to one of the above
An alias to an alias
Now, your first instinct is probably "Only accept mail from correct sources!", but that'll cause you lots of headaches down the line because people will send the damnedest things to an application mail server. I find its better to accept everything and explicitly deny the exceptions.
Debugging: Save a copy of the headers of any message you receive. This will help out tremendously anytime you have a problem.
--Edit--
I bought the book, Building Scalable Web Sites, mentioned by rossfabricant. It -does- have a good email section. A couple of important points it has are about handling email from wireless carriers and authentication of emails.
You can set the address that the email is sent from, what will be put into the To: address if someone just presses 'Reply-to'. Make that unique, and you'll be able to tell where it came from, and to where it must be directed back to.
When it comes to putting a name beside it though '"something here" ' - put something inviting to have them just reply to the mail. I've seen one major web-app, with Email capturing that has 'do not reply', which turns people off from actually sending anything to it though.
Building Scalable Web sites has a nice section on handling email. It's written by a Flickr developer.
(source: lsl.com.au)
EDIT: I misunderstood your question.
You could configure your email server to catch-all, and generate a unique reply-to address. E.g. CST-2343434#example.com.
A polling process on the server could read the inbox and parse out the relevant part from the received email, CS-2343434 could mean Customer Support ticket ID no. 2343434.
I implemented something like this using JavaMail API.
Just a thought.
The best way to achieve this will be to write a window service that acts like a mail client [pop3 or imap]. This windows service should execute a timed action triggered by a timer, which connects to the mail server and polls the server for any unread message(s) available in the email inbox. The email ID to check for is the email ID on which the users will give their input on/to. If the windows service client finds that there exists any new mail(s) then it should download and filter the email body and push further for processing based on the user input in the email. You can host the input processing in the same windows service but it is not advisable to do so. The windows service can put the inputs in a special application directory or database from where your main appication can read the user inputs received in email and process them as needed.
You will be required to develop a high performance TCP/IP client for doing so. I advise you not to use the default .Net library due to performance issues, instead use one of the best availabel open source TCP/IP implementations for .Net like XF.Server from kodart. we have used this in our applications and achieved remarkably grear results.
Hope this helps..
Bose has a pretty great system where they embed a Queue and Ticket ID into the email itself.
My company has the traditional Case # on the subject line, but when CREATING a case, require a specific character string "New Case" "Tech Support Issue" on the subject line to get through the spam filters.
If the email doesn't match the create or update semantics, the autoresponder sends an email back to the recipient demonstrating how to properly send an email, or directs them to our forums or web support site.
It helps eliminate the spam issue, and yet is still accessible to a wide technical audience that is still heavily email dependent.
Spam is going to be a bit of a concern. However since you are initiating the conversation you can use the presence of your unique identifier (I prefer to use the subject line - "Trouble ticket: Unable to log into web...[artf123456]") to filter out spam. Be sure to check the filter on occasion since some folks mangle the subject when replying.
Email is a cesspool of bad standards and broken clients. You need to be prepared to accept almost anything as input. You will need to be very forgiving about what kinds of input are tolerated. Anything easy for you to program will likely be difficult for your users to use correctly. Consider the old mailing list programs that require you to issue commands in the subject line. Only hardcore nerds can use those effectively. And some of those trouble-ticket CRM things you mentioned have bizarre requirements, such as forcing the user to reply between two specific text markers in the text. That sort of thing is confusing to people.
You'll need to deal with email clients that send you formatted text instead of plain text. Some email clients still don't handle HTML properly (cough GMail) so your replies will also need to be designed appropriately. There are various ways in which photos might be "uploaded" via email as well, especially when mobile phones are involved. You will need to implement various hacks and heuristics to deal with these situations.
It's also entirely possible that you will get email that is valid but unusable by the email parsing library you are using. Whether or not this is important enough to roll your own will be a judgement call.
Finally, others have mentioned using specific email addresses to uniquely identify a "conversation". This is probably the easiest way to do this, as the content of the mail will often not survive a round trip to a client. Be prepared, however, to get mail to old IDs from old customers who, instead of opening a new ticket somehow, reply to an old ticket. Your application will probably need some way to push emails with an old ID into a new case, either manually or automatically. For a CRM system it's very likely that a user would reply to an old email even if you already sent him a new email with a new ID in it. As for whether you should use some.email.address+some.id#yourdomain.com or just some.id#yourdomain.com, I'd go with the latter because the plus-sign confuses some email clients. Make your IDs guids or something and have some way to validate them (such as a CRC or something) and you'll get less junk. Humans should never have to type in the GUIDs, just reply to them. The downside is spam filtering: a user's computer might view such email addresses as spam, and there wouldn't be an easy way to whitelist the addresses.
Which reminds me: sending email these days is full of pitfalls. There are many anti-spam technologies which make it extremely hard for you to send email to your customers. You will need to research all of these and you need to be careful, and do some testing, to ensure that you can reach the major email providers. A website like Campaign Monitor
can help you if you are sending email.
I have a program that, for the most part, operates in the background. Let's say it DoesWork(). Once a week, I want it to notify the user on some of the work it has completed over the past few days. It will be a basic status report, listing some files that have been downloaded.
Initially, I wanted to sent this status update via email, so I looked into that but there are a lot of problems. I need an SMTP server so I looked at GMail. It's okay but has a daily limit of 500 emails, so this wouldn't be suitable for release. Also, there would be issues with the same email account password being given out in each copy of the program, which as I understand it, is a risk even if the password is stored using encryption.
Then I thought maybe I could use the user's own email account to send email to his/her self. This has a couple of complications too: the user would need to specify all of the smtp information for his/her email account, which is too complicated for the target user. Also, I don't want to have to have people entering their email account password into my program just to send emails. I don't think that's a good habit to promote.
Is there any way I could do this via email? Email was my first choice because it's a system of notification that users will already be checking. It's fairly non-intrusive.
Is it necessary to setup my own smtp server? If so, how can I do that?
If email is a no-go, I was also thinking about just generating a local HTML file with the relevent information, and then having a notification popup from the program once a week to inform the user that a new update report is ready. I think this is totally doable, it's just overly instrusive and not my first choice. I want to piggyback on a system that the user is already using.
Thanks!
-greg
An alternative is to have the program generate an RSS feed and direct the user how to subscribe to it. Also, once a new update is generated, show the update toast for about a minute, then hide it automatically and change your systray icon to something different. In about a day change it back to the original icon. Also, give the user a setting to turn the toast off permanently.
Relying on email is not a good idea, as you would have to collect the user emails and deal with the privacy issues for that, you would be effectively DOSing any third party SMTP server or would have to invest in the infrastructure for your own.
If I've understood it correctly, the user is running this program on his pc, in the background.
The perfect way to notify something would be, IMHO, giving the program is minimized to the traybar, a small popup that clicked, would open a window with a weekly report.
Hope this helps.
If you do get them to specify their own smtp server, make sure you put a "Send Test Email" button on there so they can test it. I know from experience that users always enter the wrong details when specifying a smtp server, user name, password, which is made worse since some smtp servers require a user name/password and others don't.
If they do enter the wrong details (or they change) then you might need to have some way to send them older reports, or to have some other way of notifying them that you can't send email.
Email's great, but you might need an alternative method also.
Google for simple smtp server windows gives you this
To be honest if you are just sending things once a week email is your best bet, as it's not frequent enough to garantee that the user will be at his machine to accept some other sort of request, which would require you to write proprietory software.
You could alternatively post it to an irc channel, or write an MSN bot to message the user, the message would be sent as an offline message if the user was offline.
I'd still go for email, it's tried and tested.
For a simple SMTP server I use hmail. I configure it to accept all SMTP requests from the local machine, regardless of source and destination, and to deny any SMTP requests not coming from teh localhost. This will be fine if you have a centrally located application.
If you want to distribute the app you have a whole different situation; with a lot of ISPs putting restrictions on SMTP traffic your best option would be to allow users to put in their mail account details and then use that to send mail. This will ensure everyone can put in working settings. Then use whatever library or pre-made code exists for yoru language of choice to send an email using those settings.
Does it need to be a weekly digest? Instead, how about using Growl (or equivalent) to notify the user of the tasks being completed in real-time, in the background?