I have a project to send some email to end clients. My client need to know what exactly "Email Client" they use to read the mail. I know a hidden can get the open event and even the user agent they use, so by parsing user agent i can get most email clients info.
But it's hard to detect some popular web mail clients like "Gmail", "Hotmail" and "Yahoo mail". Because user agent return is only the browser user agent string.
Edit: i think i need a result more like this:
here
You will not be able to perfectly detect the e-mail client your users are using.
In E-Mail headers some programs choose to include the X-Mailer tag, which tells you exactly with what program and version your user is sending the e-mail - of course that can be faked. Not all programs use the X-Mailer tag, I e.g. couldn't find it in a mail sent with Microsoft Outlook 2010.
Besides that you could do some guesswork by the Received from tag in the e-mail headers, but in the end you can use SMTP and POP3 with most webmailers like GMail or Yahoo. That means even though your e-mail is sent via servers from google.com, the originating client could still be Outlook or Thunderbird and not GMail itself.
Maybe we can help you if you better if you could tell us why exactly your client wants to know the programs the users use to read their mail? Probably to tune the appearance of newsletters?
I know this is a really old topic, but the most reliable way to detect webmail client for gmail, hotmail, outlook.com and office365 is to use a tracking pixel. What you will want to do is geo-locate the IP address and you'll find gmail all comes from mountain-view and microsoft based products from redmond.
I haven't validated this with non-US users, but I'd imagine the caching services they use will all be in the same place.
Cheers
Related
I have a website based on WordPress.
Every page has his own Contact form.
I am using Configure SMTP
+ Contact7
(SMTP is setup to user Gmail as a SMTP server).
After a while I'm curious why I am actually doing it this way.
Is Gmail that secure or it is only about SSL?
Is WP build in mail function secure (and good) enough to use it?
In total: what is the best way to make contact form in WordPress and avoiding my mails getting to the spam folder?
I was told that the solution descriped above (Gmail SMTP) is the best way, is it?
Well, the build-in mail function works fine for most uses, like sending "Password lost" or "New user registered" mails or even contact forms.
If you send more than just a few (can´t name a number) mails via contact forms, newsletters etc. you will probably want to use a mailserver for that, either an external one (GMail) or a properly configured internal one. They go much easier past spam protection because they are known for sending mails and are probably whitelisted at the big mail providers. Your webhost most probably is not and might be considered as spam very fast when he is sending mails regularly.
If you want to send a lot of mails in a short span of time you should probably go one step further and choose a service like Mailchimp or something similar for that. Their business is sending newsletters and so nobody (means the mail providers) wonders, when they have lots of mails incoming from one of those servers.
For your use case I would stick to SMTP via GMail, when it works fine for you. As you are not sending lots of mails in a short span of time you´ll have only little problems with getting rated as spam and you also have a trusted server sending those mails. Seems fine for me.
I have written a couple of web sites that contain a "contact us" form.
However, our host recently switched SMTP off. Their excuse is "security issues".
The solution they offer is that they implemented rules whereby all mail generated from the platforms must be sent using the sendmail/phpmail functions and pass through a mail relay which checks the mails and their content and ensures malicious content and activity is completely blocked and they recommend I use "A virtual or dedicated solution".
I have no idea what it is they want me to do to get emailing working again and this is quite urgent as many clients are not getting their emails.
Is there an easy way to go around this in order to get emailing working again?
Many thanks in advance
It generally means that you will have to specify the new mail server they are providing instead of localhost in your code. Further, earlier, you were able to send the mail without authenticating but now on, you must have an account and you must authenticate before you send the mail. (I am not sure though, may be they allow relay to their own servers and you might not need authentication).
Go to the control panel of your hosting account and check for the mail panel. Check out the new smtp server name there and code your site to use this smtp server with credentials. This will let you send mail again.
My application will be used in a manner that the user is remote from his computer running the application, receiving data via text messages sent periodically from the PC. Im sending the text message via email, using the number#carrierdomain.com. To simplify determining the user's smtp server, I've been sending the message using the destination phone carrier's smtp, instead of the whatever may or may not be available at the PC. This has worked so far with AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Verizon, as they have discontinued their smtp service.
I'm using mailsend v1.15 http://www.muquit.com/muquit/software/mailsend/mailsend.html
but Im open to alternatives.
I do have a less than ideal workaround, which is to use google or hotmail's smtp, but that requires a login/pass.
If I can send the text through regular email, using outlook, it works. I've looked at outlooks smtp logs, but that doesn't really help.
If its not being sent to a Verizon smtp server, how does it get routed, and is it something that my application can use?
Is there a reliable way to send email without having the senders smtp?
Theoretically, any smtp server can send your e-mail. However, due to the overwhelming amount of spaming on the internet, pretty much every isp has locked down their smtp server and will not allow anonymous relaying of e-mail.
If you do have the outlook client on the box you are sending the e-mail you can look at using one of the Outlook APIs:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg608200.aspx
to send the e-mail message. You are using the outlook configuration then and don't have to worry about it your code.
As long as an SMTP server is configured to allow relay from a remote domain then you can use it send email from/to virtually any address. There are downsides, however, to using any SMTP server to send an email from a specific domain - the most notable of which is that the recipient's domain will likely flag the message as spam because the domain of the SMTP server is different from that of the sender's email address.
There are other non-email APIs that can be used to send text messages, if that is something you're willing to consider. Check out:
Tropo (http://www.tropo.com)
Zeep Mobile (http://www.zeepmobile.com)
Best of luck to you.
Impossible. SMTP is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, without this is impossible to access to another account with Email format. You can make a php mail where you don't need to have smtp, but your access will be limited, not all ESP / ISP will allow you to delivery those emails, because they need to identify you using your SMTP and MX Lookup (Reverse MX A records) from your server. It exists more ways, but are 100% SPAMMERS and HACKERS methods and I don't recommend to use them.
I have a PHP web app that is going to send out about 1,000 emails. I would love to test the performance beforehand. Is there any kind of service that provides dummy email addresses to send to, for this kind of testing? I can't find anything that's not just a general bulk-email service. The key here is I just want dummy addresses to send to.
If you have the ability to just purchase a domain name from a hosting service, I know at least 1&1 gives you like 2500 email addresses per domain so you could literally spam yourself to death and not worry about any other 3rd party. You can pick up a domain name for like
When you say "test the performance", do you mean you want to know about your deliverability rates, or how your emails look?
Deliverability Rates
This is entirely dependent on your SMTP server and the reputation of the IP that it will be sending from along with your domain's SPF records and the content of your email. To maximize this, I would recommend using a marketing email service such as MailChimp or MadMimi.
Appearance of Emails
You could always just send yourself a test email to see how it looks. An alternative is to use a service like PostageApp that has a built in template designer that has both an easy email preview function and a test send email function.
(Full Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of PostageApp.)
If you use "Post Hoc" you can send email to an unlimited number of email addresses. Post Hoc acts like an SMTP server, and receives the email messages that you are sending, but it does not forward them on anywhere. You do not need to set up any email inboxes ahead of time, so there is no problem if you have 1000 different unique email addresses. They do not need to be from a single domain -- you can use any email address you want. It stores the email messages received so that you can inspect them if necessary. You would run it locally so that there is no concern about network problems, and it is very low overhead since it does almost no processing of the email. This way, the performance measure will be mostly the sending side processing. Best of all, it is open source and freely available:
Find it on GitHub: GitHub for Post Hoc
Also see the blog post: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email
I want to send mail from an iPhone app without showing an MFMailComposeViewController. I also want this mail to be sent from the user's default Mail account. Is it possible to do this?
This is not supported by the iPhone SDK, probably because Apple doesn't want you to do it.
Why not? My guess: Because it's easy to abuse. If we knew user's email address, we could spam them, we could fake emails from them, etc. Imagine finding out an iPhone app sent an email as you without your knowledge -- not cool, even if the app had good intentions.
So, anything you do to get around that, is likely to get you rejected from the app store.
Having said all that, you could basically write your own smtp interaction code to chat with the user's outgoing mail server. For example, if the user has a gmail account, you could ask them for their email and password, you'd have to know how to talk to the gmail servers, and send email through them.
Going that route means asking the user for their username, password, and either asking for or figuring out their mail server information. Another choice is to send directly from the phone (your own smpt server, not just a client), which is a bit more coding. And if you write your own server, the mail you send is more likely to be blocked since your originating IP might not match the domain on the sender's email.
There also exist some libraries that might help out. Previous related question:
Open Source Cocoa/Cocoa-Touch POP3/SMTP library?
There are legitimate reasons for wanting to send an email. (Such as communicating with a server using SMTP instead of HTTP)
This blog post should get you going: http://vafer.org/blog/20080604120118
It is possible to use MFMailComposeViewController without user interaction. See my answer on the iPhone send email not using MessageUI question.