I am creating a system for sending out notification emails. Each email is pulled from a database table. I have full control over the outbound email programatically. This system, if possible, should be able to mark these outbound emails for bounces.
What is the best way to send out an email so as to be able to link the most bounced emails back to the original outbound email? I have components that allows me to pull emails from the return mailbox so that I can get access to headers and body of the bounces. I know how to detect various bounce "types", but not sure on proven ways to match bounce to original outbound email.
One idea is to include an X-header, say "x-email-id", with intent to parse it out. Is this reliable?
Related
I'm using AWS SES to send emails to customers. I want to send an initial email to confirm an action they've made on my website, and then send subsequent emails to that same email address to notify of any subsequent activity on that initial action.
Different email clients appear to implement this behaviour differently, and I've read about the thread-index header here, but that doesn't cover all clients.
Is there a standard way to mark that an email belongs to the thread of a previously sent email?
Thanks
When adding the References Header to Emails, you can add message-ids of previously sent emails in order to create email threads.
Of course it's again a topic of the client to fulfill this feature, but it should be supported by major email clients.
Heres an old blogpost about that. (considering that email is also old, it should be fine ;) )
https://wesmorgan.blogspot.com/2012/07/understanding-email-headers-part-ii.html
I have to create email tracking system, but the problem is that when the sender opens an email this is counted as an opening by the recipient.
When I send an email through Polymail (or some other tools for tracking emails), then in the 'sent' folder I have an email without a tracking pixel, but the recipients of this email have the pixel and at the same time everyone have different code inside (I think, to determine which of the recipients opened the email).
How is this possible? The sender and the recipients have different contents of the same email. Can this be implemented using smtp / imap / gmail-api?
For standard IMAP/SMTP setups (specifically: not GMail), the message is submitted twice, once to SMTP to be sent, and again to IMAP to be placed in the Sent mailbox.
There is no requirement that these be the same: in fact, in normal use, the BCC header, for example, is submitted to IMAP, but not SMTP.
GMail, and a few others, while trying to be helpful and save bandwidth, do the copy automatically, but make it impossible to supply different versions. (Unless you want to try to find the duplicates and delete them out of band).
Current Email protocols don't send any kind of ACK to the Sender when mail is opened. So you need to put some kind of analytic tool inside the mail contents to keep the track of it.
Some suggested methods and widely used tool is Bananatag.
Alternatively, you can use custom Google Analytics for the same. Refer here https://dyn.com/blog/tracking-email-opens-via-google-analytics/
I created event registration web sites (you can imagine something like http://www.eventbrite.com/), which allow users to subscribe for event updates. When subscribed, we send mass emails (with the same content) to those users.
It was ok before, but recently I noticed that GMail always put the email into Spam folder.
As any texts would always go to Spam folder, I suspect that my domain was blacklisted by Gmail.
1) Is there a way to request google to put my domain into the whitelist?
2) Let's say it can't and I decide to register for new domain.
Is there a way to avoid the mass email to be marked as spam by Gmail? (may be something like what Facebook email notification do?)
Yes, don't send mass email :-) If you really want to avoid being considered a spammer, send out emails with less recipients, and don't swamp the mail server with them. Let's say, for example, you have thirty recipients for a given update. You can send out emails with one recipient every minute for a half hour.
Now the numbers may be different (and will of course depend on the success of your site) but the basic theory will stand up for quite a while.
As to how to get yourself whitelisted in GMail, that's really up to the recipient. They can usually do it by simply adding your email address to their contact list.
Keep in mind whitelisting there refers to individual GMail accounts, GMail itself does not whitelist IP addresses.
It does blacklist them if you misbehave but that generally means you get delivery rejects when trying to send. The fact that your messages are going in to the mail system and being delivered to spam folders indicates that this is an account-based thing, not a global GMail blacklisting of your IP/domain.
In any case, the place to report problems for GMail delivery problems is here.
As a school, we send out mass emails to our parents about events and issues. There's no way we have the time to spend sending out one email per minute. What we did was sign up with AOL as a business account, and we are allowed to do "bulk mailings" until they get multiple complaints. However, gmail clients usually have to list us as a valid sender or else those emails end up in spam folders. Works the same for clients using college alumni accounts from edu addresses. Gmail is the only one who regularly gives us this problem for our recipients on their email servers. We let parents know at orientation that they will have to specifically admit our emails via some setting on gmail.
We send out email via our own SMTP server. Is there a way to make Gmail (and others) send some kind of pingback or response, if receivers mark our mail as spam?
Is this even a feature provided by Gmail/Hotmail etc?
Email inbox services either accept an email message or reject it completely as spam, often saying so, but I don’t believe that any will provide automatic feedback once the email is delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
There are blacklists that indicate known sources of spam and the better ones are dynamic, continually adding and removing senders from the blacklists. These are high-quality blacklists that I use to filter my incoming email:
Spamhaus ZEN
SpamCop
You might benefit from periodically checking for your sending IP address on these lists.
No.
First, a huge privacy violation - "what business of yours is it what I did with an e-mail from you?"
Second, this would bring huge benefits to spammers (as #Wooble mentions in the comment) - allowing them to judge the effectiveness of spam campaigns, verify which accounts are active, and tune the content to slip through
Third, most spam received has forged headers, so the "From" address is fake anyway.
However, if you want to track your e-mails, you can
track click-throughs from your e-mails
request receipt notifications
Hotmail has this feature.
You need to enlist with their "Junk Email Reporting" program.
They send you a note whenever someone clicks "junk" on one of your emails. This way you can unsubscribe them.
I have a web app that only registered users can use, therefore I should have a valid e-mail address for the creator of the message.
One part of this web app will allow a user to create and send a e-mail message to an e-mail address that the user enters. My web server will be creating and sending the e-mail, however if there is a delivery problem with the e-mail I would like the bounce to go to the user's e-mail address instead of the server. This will allow the user to know that there was a problem delivering the message and they can take the appropriate action.
Would setting the "return-path" attribute to the user's e-mail address handle this?
As RFC2821 says:
The primary purpose of the Return-path is to designate the address to which messages indicating non-delivery or other mail system failures are to be sent. For this to be unambiguous, exactly one return path SHOULD be present when the message is delivered.
So yes, all standard compliant servers should account for the Return-path you set.
You could set up windows service on your server to periodically check BadMail folder and parse the bounced messages and resend them to the original sender. This solution would work in most cases. I don't think return-path would help in every instance (if it would at all), because different mail servers handle bounces differently.