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.
Related
This Odoo company we're working with basically sends a lot of e-mail. One e-mail thread can turn into 100+ e-mails with different people brought into the conversation (CC'd) at different times. Due to the complexity of their e-mail management, they want to use their Gmail interface (Google Hosted) and CC an e-mail into odoo and they want it to get tracked in a thread. I've basically already done that... they have an e-mail like odoo+res.partner-432#domain.com (although it's hashed to not be easily readable) - they CC this and the full body thread gets included in chatter (mail.message) under respective model / id.
The challenge with this: the chatter messages can get huge very fast, due to their e-mail messages (because each e-mail includes main reply, and all previous history on thread). I've looked into some systems that have a "reply above this line" - and it just takes the latest message. And in those systems, eg. ticketing systems such as Zendesk, help scout, I believe the teams are using the ticketing system (not a gmail) and thus there is much more control over the inbox and incoming email (not to mention, those e-mails are usually 1-to-1, not including groups).
My questions:
Is there any other workaround that you see here to have odoo pull in only the last e-mail reply and not the full e-mail thread? I could probably build something like this: https://github.com/zapier/email-reply-parser - and hook it into odoos e-mail parsing, but that works on text format e-mails only (not HTML)... only. So it's not bulletproof, and I'm not sure it's worth it.
Even if this client DID use odoo 100%, I still don't think it would be possible to get it to work the way they want without major customizations (eg. Odoo's default behavior is to include all past e-mail threads)
I'm curious if anyone here see's any other solutions, otherwise – I doubt there is something here I haven't seen. :) (But very open to be proven incorrect!)
Aside from the visual splendor of HTML emails - links are the only thing keeping me from sending plain text emails. They are much simpler for users at times and reduce bandwidth by over 50%. However, forcing my users to copy/paste or (* shiver *) type the URL from the plain text email is not acceptable.
However, it seems like many services such as gmail and hotmail are converting URLs into HTML links. If that's true, then for some lighter emails I could finally switch to plain text (in certain cases) without bothering anyone.
Anyone know what percentage (or what systems or clients) convert text URLs into clickable links?
Some users access via the web (Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail) while others use clients (Outlook/Thunderbird).
All email progams I know make links clickable, web-based and normal ones.
You should consider putting the links at the end of the mail, and use "[number]" to refer to them:
You should really visit PEAR[1] and friends, PHP[2]!
[1] http://pear.php.net/
[2] http://www.php.net/
That frees you from problems with longer URLs within the text, and it keeps the text readable.
You must not forget one simple fact and that is every mail client make this configurable. So I for one have the option of reading / sending html emails but I don't do that. So it's totally irrelevant how many mail clients support this, the relevant question is how many users have this enabled.
I always had trouble updating blogs i wrote, but it occured to me that whenever people ask me something I can give really long replies that could easily become articles.
However there`s not a feature in GMail or any other mail app for that matter, that enables me to search by message length.
Will I have to write a script to retrieve all messages and then process them or is there an easy way?
Well, what you could do is to use e.g. MS Office Outlook - I know they have a feature to create rules where you can specify to retrieve, move and what-not with e-mails sized over X ammount of kilobytes.
Might be an option?
Most services offered online today that claim to "track" e-mails, do so by embedding images in the emails. My questions are:
Is this the only way to do it and if not, what are the other methods?
Are any of the methods actually fool-proof?
Has anybody had any luck with specific software or even an online group?
Yes, this is pretty much the only way to do it. Consider that an email is something that is inherently static. The only way to know if someone has "opened" an email is for the email to send some information back to your server. Most email clients these days support HTML emails, which means that you can get the client to request an image (or anything else) from your server by embedding the proper HTML tags. Other than this, you cannot force an email client to do anything it doesn't want to do. It's a separate program on a remote computer, and you have no control over it.
No, there's no foolproof way. There will always be emails you can't track. If someone downloads their email and disconnects from the internet before reading it, you can't track that email. Most email clients allow you to disable image loading now as well if you want to, so that can block tracking too.
I've usually written my own, so I wouldn't know what to recommend. I imagine most services will be quite similar, so I'd base a product/purchase decision on how easy their front-end is to use.
In addition to pixel tracking, a second way to track open rates is by looking for clickthroughs. If someone clicked through, then they must have opened it. This is infrequent, but it's important not to throw this data away.
More details:
How MailChimp tracks open rates
How CampaignMonitor tracks open rates
Wikipedia on email open rates
Hubspot on open rate issues
Facebook uses a bgsound element in addition to an img element like this:
<img src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=999999999999"
style="border:0;width:1px;height:1px;" />
<bgsound src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=99999999999&s=a"
volume="-10000" />
This is the best way, and it's hardly ideal - many e-mail clients block images to start with.
No, no methods are foolproof. A foolproof method of detecting if someone had read an e-mail would be a significant privacy issue.
I've used ExactTarget and CampaignMonitor's tracking systems. Both worked pretty well for tracking trends - i.e. twice as many people opened e-mail #1 than #2 - but you never know how many missed opens there are due to images not being shown.
Pixel tracking is the only way to track open rates. Then the links in your emails are also tracked through a redirect service for click rates. Absolutely nothing is going to be foolproof. You will have to use some guess work to figure out your actual open rate since some email clients will only take the text version and not the html and also some clients do not load images by default.
SilverPop is a popular one. They actually use PowerMTA on the back-end. Our company just ended up licensing PowerMTA and writing our own front-end and tracking.
No it's not the only way. Your HTML e-mail can refer to a web server for 'some content' which is then tracked. That could be an image, a stylesheet, some Javascript, etc. Most mail clients hate it and nothing automated is guaranteed to work.
Gain the trust of your recipient and invite them to your website. Track clicks.
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