For example Groupon and Facebook seem to use these.
Groupon <reply-fec4e341ec32311-125727_HTML-677829183-96988-0#e.groupon.com>
Reply to Comment <g+41wq2z1j00000000u2kx002eqs1u620s0037hlmwm4621up33#groups.facebook.com>
In the facebook example - it makes sense that I could be replying to a particular comment thread and this is a unique hash that lets me do so from within an e-mail.
As for the groupon example, I am not aware of the purpose.
If I had to guess, I'd say Groupon does it so they can tie replies/complaints to a specific campaign. They must send out many millions of mails a day, and probably have many hundreds of campaigns running at the same time. Being able to automatically link feedback to a campaign is probably a huge time saver, and provides useful KPI stats.
Related
I just created a Google form for online enquiries for my business. I set it up so that it sends an email to the person who submits the form using the "FormEmailer" script but my question is, is there a way I can give that person or more specifically that FormEmailer generated email a unique "Reference" number at the time of submission?
Thanks in advance.
Dan
Absolutely, if you are willing to do some coding on your own.
You may want to look at the recently launched Form Notification add-on for Google Forms, which also sends emails to people who respond to a form. This add-on is meant to be a code sample, and you can find the source code on GitHub, and a quickstart about it in the Apps Script documentation.
To do what you are asking, you would just need to copy the code and add another "Reference number" field to the RespondentNotification template, and then modify the sendRespondentNotification() function accordingly. Alternatively, you can just insert the reference number into the email subject in that function.
Note that this add-on has some limitations: the number of emails sent out (like all of Apps Script) are subject to quota limits. In addition, the add-on isn't really meant used for forms with multiple collaborators/editors. However, Form Notifications should give you a good idea of how to write scripts that respond well to form submissions.
I've been exploring ways that it might be possible to promote the business of a friend of mine. One of these ways is by encouraging users to check in to his business, the incentive for this being that they go into the draw to win some kind of prize.
I've been trying to find if the code for this already exists but I might be looking in the wrong places. If it doesn't what would be the best way to do it using the graph APIs.
Thanks.
You can use Facebook app to check-in to your page/business.
All page check-ins can be fetched using following request by your code
https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID/checkins?access_token=PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN
If you want to get only specific time period check-ins use since and until params in query.
You have to parse the json response and store in an array and randomly select the winner.
you can contact the winner using their facebook id and send them a message.
You will have to write the code yourself, but it would essentially work like this:
Get the user to allow access to the "Raffle" application and get their email address and permissions to look at their check-ins. Email is required to contact the winner.
Use a scheduled script (cronjob) to periodically check if the user has checked-in anywhere (in particular, the business you want to promote).
Award a raffle ticket for each unique check-in within a 24 hour period.
Hold a draw between all the users who checked in on that day or week and award the prize to someone randomly.
Pretty simple flow, but complex code.
I'm writing a school administration software package, but it strikes me that many developers will face this same issue: when communicating with users, should you use email or SMS or try to combine them?
A previous version of this question was closed for being too subjective. The answers will be somewhat subjective but I do think this is a good question, topical and not yet debated widely. I'll try to narrow it down as much as I can:
Is it feasible to give users the choice of email versus SMS, and have the same business logic apply to both, with the help of a long form and short form message template?
Do users get annoyed when receiving the same message over SMS and email?
Is it common to present administrators with a single report listing message delivery failures combining both SMS and email?
Are there significant numbers of users who prefer to be contacted via facebook rather than SMS or email?
Is there a best practice for all this stuff?
Is there a place on the web where this stuff has been debated?
Are there any reputable commentators who have made predictions about the future of all this stuff?
I'm particularly interested in hearing from developers who have already grappled with these questions.
Is it feasible to give users the choice of email versus SMS, and have the same business logic apply to both, with the help of a long form and short form message template?
Yes, you can implement logic for the user to select which methods of communication he would like to use
Do users get annoyed when receiving the same message over SMS and email?
ABSOLUTELY! Unless the user has set up to receive messages in both the formats
Is it common to present administrators with a single report listing message delivery failures combining both SMS and email?
Yes
Are there significant numbers of users who prefer to be contacted via facebook rather than SMS or email?
Cannot comment on this, YMMV depending on the usage of the site, the target user group etc. You site stats & trends over a period of time will help fine-tune this aspect.
Is there a best practice for all this stuff?
Sure, see a lot of sites which give opt-in/opt-out options for getting communications from the sites. The tendency to spam/flood inboxes with a lot of email should be avoided & the user should be able to set how little/much data should be sent to him & in what format. Google is your friend here, there are tons of articles out there on different aspects.
Is there a place on the web where this stuff has been debated?
I am sure you will find all sorts of legal & other details around this aspect, google is your friend on this item
I have a web site using Facebook Connect where people have a strong incentive to create fake Facebook accounts and login multiple times in order to get more "votes" in my singing competition.
Anyways, I've come up with a strategy to identify these fake accounts and not let them use my site. (Haven't done the programming yet)
If their earliest wall post is more than 30 days old, then validate them.
If they have more than 20 friends, then validate them.
If their first profile picture is more than 30 days old, then validate them.
If their account has been phone verified, then validate them.
Number 4 is the one I'm having trouble with. One post I read says the GRAPH API has a verified field, but suggests that shows if the email has been verified (but not phone). This has proven a tough thing to search for. So I'm still unsure if this is possible.
Any comments on my strategy or help with #4 would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Actually the verified field should be what you are looking for. From the docs:
A user is considered verified if she takes any of the following
actions:
Registers for mobile
Confirms her account via SMS
Enters a valid credit card
We use verified and friend count to limit people. We even put those requirements into our legal terms so there's no misunderstanding.
I'm using rails 2 for this app, with ActionMailer, but this is a general question about emails.
When we send out emails, i save a record corresponding to the email in a database table. I'd like to keep track of whether people have read the emails, and am wondering the best way to do it. On initial googling, it seems like i've stumbled into an ongoing battle between spammers and email clients!
My first thought was to use the "read receipt" header, but i know that this isn't supported by a lot of clients and is therefore unreliable. After that, i read of the tactic of including an image in the mail, and of detecting that image being loaded. I was thinking that i could put a parameter with the email record's id in the image url, so that when i get a request for that image i can see if it has a (for example) email_id param and if so, mark the corresponding email as having been read.
But, then i remembered that many clients are wise to this tactic and specifically ask the viewer of the mail if they want to display images. Obviously they might say no.
Am i right in thinking that i can't pull in other resources, such as stylesheets, in my mail? Because if i can pull them in, i could do that same trick but with the stylesheet rather than an image.
Grateful for any advice, max
Externally-hosted stylesheets are generally treated the same way as images. The client will not download them without prompting the user, if that works at all with HTML-formatted emails.
One thing to consider- you're looking to determine whether the email was read, not necessarily just received, right? Format your email so that it can't be easily read without viewing the images, and include a "view in browser" link at the top. Track image and page-format views and I think you'll have a fairly reliable way to measure actual reads.
Bit late on this, but we've got a similar problem.
We're tracking the links to our site that are included within the email. We're doing this by, like you, having a DB record per email sent out. We've generated a unique hash key per email and are including that as a parameter on all the links included in the email.
We simply then have a before_filter that looks for the parameter and records the fact against the correct email record by using the unique hash to identify the correct one.
We use a unique hash key (rather than the DB's primary key) just so it is a little bit more secure / reliable.
Obviously this method only helps us track the clicks our emails have generated (and not if they've been read) but it is still useful as we can see which of ours users has clicked on which links.
We are having major problems with this as well.
We have task wek portal, where users create tasks (like paint my house) and then we invite painters to give the task creator an price on painting his house.
For that we had a very advanced email system, that sends an invitation and if they accept the invitation we send them the contact info of the task creator.
We need to be able to track if the email was opened, and then once it's opened, we know that the company got the contact info, and we can now send another email to the task creator, telling them that they can expect to be contacted by that company.
The problem is that tracking if the email was opened is not reliable at all. There are different systems for this like msgtag (which does not support a wide range of mail clients like yahoo and other major clients) and our email API client (elastic email) even offer some API call back functions to tell us if each email was opened or bounced or whatever. But again, it's not reliable. To track if it's open, elastic email just includes a 1x1 px image and track if it's opened. So if people don't click "show images in this email" it's not tracked as opened.
So basically we are down to two options.
Have vital portions of the content printed on images, that they have to view to get the info we want to track if they got (in this case contact info)
Just have a link in the email "click here to get the contact info" and then track if that is clicked.
So in conclusion, the "track if opened" is totally useless and unreliable, unless you can fully control which email clients your recipients are using and how they are using them (like if they are all your employees or something).