I'm trying to piece out how difficult it would be to set up an email server that will accept a URL as the subject of an email and respond with an attached copy of said webpage, or element(s) of that webpage (ie, an image from the page, or all of the videos on the page).
I don't necessarily need the code written for me, but would appreciate if someone could suggest a starting point.
I have very little web-programming knowledge (some C++, some Actionscript), which is partly why I don't even know where to begin.
There is several ways to achieve this.
In most unix MTAs you can set up an alias to pipe all messages for some address through a program.
This program need to parse the message header for the "from" and "subject", fetch the url and sent it back.
You can also do this with a program like fetchmail, so you dont even need to make something in the server side.
Finally, several languages have wonderful libraries fetch the mail using POP3, parse it, fetch the URL from the subject and compose a new mail message. Should be no more than 100 code lines with perl or python.
Related
I just spent a little time browsing similar questions on here, and it looks like some mail frameworks have a way of sending the proper signals to a mail client for the confirmation of read receipts.
The project on which I am working must have Read-Receipts requested as all the recipients have auto-sent read receipts enabled, and also have images blocked so I'm unable to use image-loading for tracking.
I'm most familiar with Python, Flask, and Flask-Mail, which is why I'm starting here to see if anyone knows a way to request this through these frameworks, or perhaps knows what to add to a to a mail header to request this.
Thanks!
So after a little more research and testing, in the absence of a specific setting in Flask-Mail for read-receipts, it is possible to request them by defining the header Disposition-Notification-To using extra_headers in the Flask-Mail Message() definition in order to trigger a read-receipt request:
sender = 'sender#domain.com'
recipient = 'recipient#anotherdomain.com'
msg = Message(subject='Testing Read Receipt',
recipients=[recipient],
sender = ('Testy McTesterson', sender),
extra_headers={'Disposition-Notification-To': sender})
I am using the current link in my email.
*|baseUrl|*/verifyEmail?token=*|token|*
This however causes one or two people to get strange links from the email and get not found, usually based on some random email providers. E.g. - if I use a 10 minute mail (10minutemail.com), I get the following:
https://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/www.mywebsite.com/verifyEmail?token=b32fee82da59e7b4085269faca35ec7025122876
Correct link: www.mywebsite.com/verifyEmail?token=b32fee82da59e7b4085269faca35ec7025122876
Assuming this is due to baseUrl? Am I doing something fundamentally wrong when setting up my email link?
You need to include http:// or https:// with your baseUrl. Otherwise the email client may prepend a default base address instead of 'just' the missing protocol, especially if it is a webmail client.
I've used ColdFusion for sending text emails for years. I'm now interested in learning how to send those pretty emails you see from companies like Mint.
Anyone know of a good ColdFusion tutorial to teach me how to make this work and not get hit by bugs or spam filters?
As Ray said, ColdFusion supports HTML email, which is how you make an email "pretty". A quick down and dirty sample looks like this:
<cfmail from="bob#bob.com" to="someguy#email.com" subject="Check this out!" type="HTML">
<HTML>
<head><title>My Email</title>
</head>
<body>
<!--- Style Tag in the Body, not Head, for Email --->
<style type="text/css">
body { font-size: 14px; }
</style>
This is the text of my email.
</body>
</HTML>
</cfmail>
That's it, you've just sent an email. Notice how there is nothing preventing you from sticking in any old from email address you like? That leads me to my next point, in which you're wondering how to avoid getting hit by Spam filters:
The short answer is: You can't.
Oh sure, you can do intelligent things, like not including the word "VIAGRA" in your email (unless you're trying to send out penile enlargement emails and want to know how to get past spam filters, in which case I'm disinclined to help), but let's assume you just want to avoid obvious pitfalls.
I can think of two things that might help:
Send out email from a domain registered to the from email address. I didn't make the rules, but this one can be a pain. Ie., If you try to send out proxy emails for myorg.com, and your server does not host myorg.com, some spam filters are going to block it. What is usually done is to apply some branding to the from email, like this:
<cfmail from="MyOrg.Com <DONOTREPLY#registeredsite.com>" replyto="bob#myorg.com" to="someguy#email.com" subject="Test" type="HTML">
</cfmail>
In this case the email is sent from your server at registeredsite.com, with a replyto being the proxy email address. Spam filters will probably be okay with this, since the from email address of *#registeredsite.com resolves to your server. Try to send out with bob#myorg.com in the from, and you'll definitely run into some places that will block you.
Use a physical server, not a cloud site. I'm running into this very issue right now, but if you don't use a physical server that is located at a dedicated IP to send out your email, and if this server is not the originator of the email, some places are going to block it. This means no EC2 or Rackspace cloud site--sorry, some sysadmins are inclined to put down the banhammer on anything that originates from one of these providers, seeing as it is so easy to churn up your own little spam factory using EC2 or Rackspace for very little cost.
Even if you take these precautions, however, you'll run into a situation where someone gets a hold of your domain name and drags it through the mud. They'll send out thousands of emails to the internet in your name--or rather, in your domain's name--and because of the insecurity of email, your domain will get added to someone's blacklist after a thousand occurrences of hotlove4u#registeredsite.com hit the sysadmin's inbox. There's nothing you can do about it, either.
Or you can decide to run a cloud app and use a remote mail server. But some jokers will get one look at the originator being EC2 and will say, "Nope, sorry. Denied." They don't care about the legitimacy of your organization, only the origin of the email.
Email is an antiquated technology that has been rushed into mass usage before we really were able to think of a better protocol. As a protocol, it's terrible....and yet we're stuck with it, for backwards compatibility reasons. You cannot possibly avoid the spam filter. 95% of the email on the internet is junk mail, and never even reaches the intended recipient. Just absorb the enormity of that statistic for a moment, and pull your ideas back to reality. Many of the spam-prevention techniques being used today are unnecessarily aggressive, and create a great many 'false positives'. You can shoot for, say 80% of your email being sent, but what it really comes down to is this: As soon as the email has been fired off, it's completely out of your control. You can only take responsibility for so much.
What do you mean by "pretty" - HTML based? CF supports html email. Just use type="html". You can also use cfmailpart to send both text and html versions of the same content.
Here's a good article on making HTML email using CSS:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters
Ray's answer is right on the money about the CF part, but most of making this work is about HTML, CSS and testing testing testing.
And I would add to this all that you can check whether a mail will be displayed correctly and whether it will get hit by a spamfilter or not by going to a website that is called litmusapp. You can send your test newsletter to one of their emailaddresses and then they will give you screenshots of how each newsletter will look like in each type of emailclient. Also it checks the newsletter against a few popular spamblockers and gives you advice on what to change.
I would start by finding an HTML template email that you like. Then you put it in the tags with the type set to html as mentioned above. You might want to consider doing the multipart email to handle plaintext (and blackberry) users.
I subscribe to the Campaign Monitor Newsletter & they also have a list of very useful articles here: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/
Might want to check out this ebook from MailChimp. Email apps render HTML in some unusual ways, so be prepared to use tables for layout.
Remember when you try to change the color of the font or background when you writing a cfmail, before you add #F0000, you need to ad extra # at the front of it, like ##F0000. Otherwise, it will cause an error.
I am trying to embed an ID into an email so that when a recipient replies to an email that my system sends out, my system can pick it up and match the two together.
I have tried appending a custom header, however this is stripped out when the user replies.
I have tried embedding an HTML comment within the email, but outlook does not seem to keep comments when a reply email is created.
Worst case scenario, I can manually try and match the sent and received emails by time span or have a visible tag within the message body.
Does anyone know of a more elegant solution?
Thanks in advance
Email messages already contain such an identifiers, called Message-ID. And there's even a way to send which message you're replying to by sending that ID in a header called In-Reply-To. That's done by pretty much all email clients, that's how they usually do their threading.
It's defined in RFC 822 (yep that's pretty old) and probably re-defined and refined in more modern versions of that.
I have seen a method that includes a one byte image with a unique name that's linked to the user. When they view the email and download the images, your HTTP server will record a hit for that unique image. Of course the user needs to display images, but you can include a message in the body asking them to display the images. We actually include content in an image so they need to show images.
If your incoming e-mail can handle +foo or -foo suffixes, use that.
Many e-mail systems can route user+foo#example.com or user-foo#example.com
to user#example.com. You can replace foo with some kind of identifier.
Several mailing list servers use this for tracking bounces.
While I can't say for certain, my investigation in that sort of matter some time ago yielded the following "conclusion":
Headers are transformed a lot
Message bodies are transformed a lot
This is partly because, I suspect, of:
Need to protect users from malicious intentions
Need to perform "targeted marketing"
I have seen "unique codes" flying around in clear text in the email body but I would suggest having a unique identifier embedded in the return address instead.
The usual approach is to place the id in the subject line and/or somewhere visible in the message text and informing the recipient that he should not modify the subject or quote the original mail when responding.
What techniques are available for sending an email via a webpage or a form on a webpage?
I've got some background idea that you POST the form data to a script but I've don't really know what a cgi script is (I'd love to learn if this is the suggested method!) or what the current practice is.
This is just to provide some way for users to contact the operators. The in-page form seems like it would be easier on the user than ask them to open their mail client. I was also concerned about bots harvesting the contact email address (in the case of mailto: links).
When you submit a form, the data in that form gets sent to the server-side script. For example, in PHP you access that data with the $_POST array, the <input name=""> becomes the arrays index.. For example..
// <form action="mailer.php">[..]<input name="subject" [..]><input name="content" [..]></form>
echo("The subject is: ". $_POST['subject']);
echo("The content is:" . $_POST['content']);
At the most basic level, all you have to do is use your programming languages built in mail function. Again, in PHP this is simple mail():
mail($to, $subject, $message);
You would just set $to to your email address (Do not allow the user to set this, or they are able to send mail as "you", to anyone - "spam"..), $subject and $message would be set form $_POST[]
Before you go any have a HTML file that goes to a script with mail("me#example.com", $_POST['subject'], $_POST['content']);, think what would happen if someone reloaded that page 200 times.. You must have some kind of security in it, probably a captcha, and/or rate-limiting.
One thing, that has bugged me before - remember a "contact us form" is not a replacement for giving an actual email address! For example, my mail client keeps a copy of all mail I send, and I can attach files, and it's much nicer writing in a familiar mail client than a form <textarea> (especially when the I accidently hit "back" and the form decides to clear itself)!
For most unix/bsd/linux systems, most languages provide a programmatic wrapper around the Mail command.
If you are using the ASP.NET 2.0, you can use the System.Net.Mail namespace.
More information here
todays languages for web development usually have libraries for sending e-mail. it depends which language you use, but you'd find it in your language's docs. it's pretty simple, the library inside your language usually encapsulates and provides 'smtp client' behavior which you use. you provide mail message with sender and recipient, and the data for connecting to your SMTP server.
or, you sometimes may use the SMTP capabilities on the machine where your web server is, if those are available. i'm not sure whether it gets worse for the e-mail at the recipient server because your server might not be recognized as mail server for the domain... someone with more experience might comment on that.
Well, here's what not to do:
Please spam me, kthx
It is a better code pattern to have users submit a form, sanitize the input and format it however you see fit, and then pass the data to a mail function in your language of choice.
Sending mail should be done server-side - the specifics change according to your server-side language, your operating system, and what access your server has to an SMTP server.
If you're looking for a lightweight way to add a contact form to a blog or public website, try Wufoo - you can add a contact form that will send you email very easily (up to 3 forms for free). I am not affiliated with them, I just think they're cool.