I'm retrieving all the messages from a given mailbox, and if one of them contains problematic attachments, I want to send an email to the sender of that message, explaining the problem, and including the original email as an attachment.
I need to either put the message into a stream, or save it to the filesystem. I imagine the former would be better, but I can't see any methods that can do that.
How big are the attachments that you want to forward? With the Graph there is a 4MB limit that you will hit with some of the endpoints that will restrict the methods you can use to do this. Eg if all the Messages are under 4MB then you could either attachment them as an Item attachment https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/message-post-attachments?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http but for your purposes you'll loose fidelity on things like Internet Message headers which won't help with working out what's gone wrong with the message. Probably what you want to do is download the message first as MIME https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/outlook-get-mime-message save it as an Eml file and then attach that file. If you need to deal with 4MB+ emails you need to check the size and use https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/outlook-large-attachments?tabs=http when necessary.
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'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.
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 have a system that sends mail.
I have a system that receives mail.
I need to identify that a received mail correlates with the one the other system sent.
The particular thing here is that either the subject or the body can be modified.
I thought on putting some hash in the header of the sent email, but I don't know where this could be added
Don't you have any clue?
As you did not supply enough detail for a language specific answer, I will explain the general approach.
You can add a custom header to your outbound email, using x-vendor-header style for the header (start with x- to mark it as an extension, then vendor- for your company and end with the header name. The can be a unique identifier for the email message.
You can look for this header in your inbound process to identify the message.
I've finally found the solution:
Most email's servers support to put something after the username using '+' as separator. So I can encrypt some id and decrypt it when is replied looking on the from address.
example:
neuquino+encryptedID123421234#gmail.com
I hope this can help someone else with the same problem