With regards an OMS, what is the best method to send a confirmation email? The 2 options I have so far are;
A script on the order page sends an email once the record is written to the database.
A scheduled task on the server, send the email, polling the database every-so-often to find new entries.
Which method do systems currently use?
For e-commerce websites, it might be better to think about the best user experience.
Given that, you would want to send the email as soon as the order is received so the user knows that they have purchased the item. The sooner it gets into their inbox, the sooner they will be happy that they have made their purchase.
I agree with Digbyswift that sending the confirmation email once the record is written to the database is the least scalable. But I would argue that if your system has gotten to the point that you are taking so many orders that your system cannot keep up, you have a wonderful problem on your hands that you now probably have resources to handle.
At PostageApp, we handle the emails of a few e-commerce websites, so perhaps you would benefit from an arrangement with an email service provider to off-load this task so that all of your resources can be spent on keeping your site up and your databases running.
Here are some great alternatives if PostageApp is not your style:
Sendgrid
Postmark
Mailjet
This is a question of scalability. Sending a confirmation email once the record is written to the database is the least scalable. The more orders that are taken , the more emails are sent potentially tying up resources.
A scheduled task is certainly better as emails can be queued up and can be sent in a separate process.
A further option which you could consider is using neither and delegating the responsibility of sending emails to a 3rd party dedicated emailing service, i.e. via an API. This is much better since your hosting does not have to consider the load and you can utilise any reporting offered by the 3rd party. Plus many services offer a free quota up to a certain threshold. This will allow you OMS and business to scale appropriately.
If you apply a message based architecture; you could just publish an order created message and have any number of subscribers respond to that event. You could create a listener that sends the email in house (bespoke option) or another listener that called the API of a 3rd party emailer to send the email on your behalf (as per #Digbyswift)
What I've always liked about this approach is
You can have any number of listeners live at any one time.
You can create a new listener and change how you send the email without needing to change/redeploy the OMS application itself.
You can take the listener(s) off line and stop / delay the sending of the email without losing any notifications or affecting the OMS itself.
Related
I want to learn different ways how you guys handle incoming emails in Dynamics CRM.
How you make sure that everyone is responding to their emails?
Can we filter incoming emails to get the ones which are not yet
replied? On daily basis we are getting a lot of emails and we want
to have a filtered view where we can only see the emails which are
not yet replied yet.
How you deal with incoming emails which are sent to sales#
accounting# etc.
3A. How you distribute them among different users?
Assigning to them?
Forwarding to them?
3B. And how you make sure that they are replying to those emails?
I will appreciate if you I can learn from your experience on this subject
Use the existing Customer Service module which Microsoft has built for this purpose. Incoming emails create Case records, which are actionable items with associated statuses.
How you make sure that everyone is responding to their emails?
Set up workflows so that unassigned cases cause escalation of some sort (i.e. an email sent to a manager)
Can we filter incoming emails to get the ones which are not yet replied? On daily basis we are getting a lot of emails and we want to have a filtered view where we can only see the emails which are not yet replied yet.
Filter by Case status
How you deal with incoming emails which are sent to sales# accounting# etc.
- How you distribute them among different users?
You can set up routing logic so that cases are tagged with specific attributes, or assigned to specific users based on what address the originating email targeted.
Assigning to them?
This is out of the box case functionality
Forwarding to them?
Set up a workflow to send an email to the case owner or other user
And how you make sure that they are replying to those emails?
A simple option is to review the email history associated with the case. Automating this task is certainly possible but can get complicated.
You could add each email into a queue, and have users process emails out of the queue.
There is a setting to enable this on the entity configuration with the customisations area.
Emails when tracked or synchronised then appear within Dynamics within the queue.
Users then process the queue. This also caters for the scenario where emails do not need a reply - they can be removed from the queue. In this model, the emphasis switches from checking emails are replied to, to checking queues are cleared.
Reply email are linked back to the original email via the Parent Activity Id. So you could build a filter around this.
Create a queue for these to receive email.
The email address that you enter in the Incoming Email field receives all messages sent to the queue.
A) Users can pick items from the queue, a team leader can assign queue items to others, or use bespoke customisation or development to automatically route items.
B) As above.
Here is the reason for my peculiar question:
I am working on a mortgage application for a mortgage broker where each mortgage application is a record. Now this broker will take each of the applications he has received and enter this application (in an up line lender's system) and during the life of this mortgage application, he receives notification emails about updates from the up line lender.
It is required that in this application, all emails pertaining to a particular mortgage application are visible under that record.
My plan is to have all emails collect in a single inbox, and give that inbox an alias corresponding to the record id of the mortgage record. The alias remains active as long as the mortgage application is active and the broker cares for receiving these updates. Once the mortgage application record is dead, that alias is removed.
When displaying the particular mortgage record, I can query the mail server for the emails where the to address is the alias of that particular record.
My key requirements are:
The email server or email service should allow for about 400-500 aliases at a time.
Should have an API interface for creating and deleting an alias.
As far as the creating/deleting API is concerned, Google Apps (https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/directory/v1/guides/manage-user-aliases) really fits the requirement, but has a 30 alias limit.
Does Microsoft Outlook online mail support this kind of API and ability to create mailbox alias?
If we went in the direction of having a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010/2013, would it allow programmatic access to create aliases? What would be the license cost?
Thanks in advance for looking this up.
With update from #mti2935, I am considering a catch-all solution rather then deal with creating aliases.
So, now I think all I need is to be able to process the emails. What's the best means of processing emails (in my case, I will simply have to look at the "to" field and put the emails in different buckets).
I have found a third party service that can help me parse emails. Definitely going to try that out and provide an update here.
Service: https://postmarkapp.com/inbound
Referenced by a post on: How to setup a mail server?
One option to consider is to setup a mail server using qmail, configured as a catch-all for your domain, such that all mail to *#yourdomain.tld forwards to a script which parses each incoming message, scrapes the to, from, subject, etc. logs the messages in your database, etc. It's easier than it sounds to setup. See How to setup a mail server?. This can be done fairly inexpensively on a Rackspace or AWS cloud server.
I am build a tool that initiates an SMTP transaction with a domain to see if (a) that domain can receive emails and (b) the desired address exists on that domain. I will be batching large groups of email addresses (10,000+ at a time), but I don't want to bombard the server and get blacklisted. Are there guidelines for how often is it safe to communicate with an SMTP server?
I know about the VRFY command, but it is not implemented across the board. I plan to attempt to use the VRFY command and fall back to using,
MAIL From:<user#example.com>
RCPT To:<first.last#example.org>
QUIT
to see if the message will be deliverable. Again, are there guidelines on how often I can initiate an SMTP transaction like this on a domain?
Edit:
The purpose of this is to create a tool that my organization can use to (a) clean some bad emails from several largely inactive lists so that we do not have to pay our email delivery system to send potentially thousands of emails that will bounce, and (b) check an email when a user subscribes to a list so that we reject emails like aoghuifdgsiuvb#gmail.com.
First of all, spamming is bad. Always ask user wheter she wants to receive newsletters.
"Unsort" mail addresses by domain, leaving the "distance" between e-mail addresses with same domain as big possible.
I think it's not the programmer's decision. There should be a config value which tells a minimum amount of time between two mail sending to the same domain. You should set up a limit also for that config value, avoid setting it to zero or low value.
The only universal guideline I believe can be offered is "don't do this". If you behave like a spammer, you will be treated like a spammer. In the optimistic scenario, sites will already have controls in place, and silently throttle or block you. In less ideal scenarios, they will initiate actions against you on the (reasonable) assumption that you are collecting addresses for a spam list.
A better soluton would be to actually follow through the whole SMTP session, sending a user an email with a verification code/link. This has the advantage of showing that the user actually has control of the address in question and it keeps you from looking like a spam bot.
Volume is not as much the issue as reputation. Let the user know you're about to send them an email in your web flow. This means they're much less likely to mark it as spam.
some hosts have clear and defined guidelines as to how many emails can be sent per hour.
So i guess this would depned onyour hostng service provider, UNLESS your hosting your own mail server off course.
Can someone help me understand what SendGrid actually adds to an application architecture? Is it's role really as limited as being an alternative delivery engine (SMTP) and post-send analytics? I was hoping that it would do more for transactional email, but everything that I see/read indicates that this is the limit.
My primary use case is for transactional email (new registrations, contact requests, etc.). I'd really like to hear how others have deployed SendGrid within the context of their own web applications. Your experiences may help me better understand how I can best deploy it within my own.
Thanks.
I implemented SendGrid at my last job, and shortly after left that job to go work at SendGrid. At the time, I simply set it up as an SMTP relay, and it took less than 5 minutes.
Scott's answer nailed it, though. We do a lot more than transactional messaging though. We have a newsletter product that you can plug into. A common use case is when a user registers on your site, you send them a transactional Email and fire off an API call to us to add them to one or more mailing lists based on their opt-in preferences. Then, whenever you want to send an Email to your users, you send us a single message via API with the name of the list, and we take care of delivering it on your behalf. We also help with unsubscribes -- eg. if a user unsubscribes from any message, we can use that event to trigger a call back to your site so you can handle anything on your end as well like un-selecting an opt-in checkbox the next time they view their user profile. I know several small businesses run by friends who do this exactly, including my last job who set this up after I left that company.
Another common setup is having one IP address for your transactional Email, and another IP for newsletters. This way if users flag a newsletter as spam (because they're too lazy to click an unsubscribe link, for example), it won't hurt the reputation of the transactional Emails getting through.
Don't hesitate to contact us with questions. We love to help!
If your primary use case is for transactional email, then SendGrid is the right solution for you. It is essentially a drop in replacement for your SMTP, but will scale way better than you could building something yourself from the ground up. It takes time to setup your own SMTP and time to make sure it's not falling over and sending out emails that never get to their destination.
All SendGrid does is email, so all the heavy lifting and boilerplate tedious setup is done for you. You mention transactional email, that is SendGrid's sweet spot. They make sure email gets where it's supposed to go. The big bonus is they give you a lot of tracking goodies along with making sure your email gets where it's supposed to go. There are a number of large companies that said the 15 minutes they spent switching to SendGrid upped their delivery rates substantially.
Unless you love running an SMTP server, instead of building your own product, I'd highly recommend offloading delivery to someone else.
Currently in our application admin of a company invite multiple users to system. Our design is:
take admin chosen separated email addresses, check user if exist and member of current company do nothing. if exist but not member of current company do some setup and add to company and send welcome email. if not not exist set user account add to company and send invitation email. But there is a hard roadblock. Admins want to invite up to 5000 emails. Because of currently we invite in web application and send email one by one (we have to, because of uniqueness and activation code) admin can't invite more than 20-30 emails at same time, because of timeout.
I thought to take email to another table and do operation with timer?
What is the best practice for this ?
Enviorenment
ASP.NET MVC2 on amazon-ec2 server. Also we have timer quartz.net
I come from a linux/PHP background but it seems to me your problem can be solved with a queue?
You basically get all the emails you need sending add them to the queue and have another process take a few emails off the head of the queue and send. Rise, repeat until queue is empty.
Since you are on EC2, have you taken a look at how Amazon SQS might be able to help? If you want a readymade component, I googled and found this email queue component for asp.net that seems to solve the exact problem you are having (although will cost you $)