We're looking for the best way to integrate dynamic content into emails sent by various individuals (or companies) using various mass mailing systems, some of them proprietary.
What are the options to do that and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
For example, I guess that one of the options is to add an iframe to the emails. In this case the url for the iframe content will carry a token which will identify the specific email, and our system will generate the iframe content.
Any advice on the subject is highly appreciated.
Most email readers won't allow you to input dynamic content into emails. Unfortunately there's no way round this other than asking the users to click a link to get to the content (something I've seen done before).
Almost all email clients nowadays do not even download images from remote locations unless explicitly told to do so, let alone displaying iframes. So your best bet will be to ask users to click some link.
I created a multi threaded email mailer that has to generate unique content for each user. Each thread is creating the body of the email. Each section in the email has reference links to the detail page of that record inside the system
Related
I am guessing there is no support for this, but need to confirm for a client.
I am using send_flow from the API. Is it possible to:
In any way add recipients to an existing Email Collector? The reason is that automating surveys creates quite a few collectors if done daily or more frequently.
Is it possible to send in HTML in email_message.body_text programmatically? It does state plain text in the documentation, and it does not get converted and shows up in the email as plain text. If I use the same HTML-code in an Email Collector created in the SurveyMonkey-website, it works fine, but then again I have no way of using an existing collector it seems, as in question 1.
Continuing from question 2, if we can't send in HTML programmatically, is there a way to change the default email template? The API states "Default template is used if this [body_text] is not specified", but I can't see any option of customizing this in our client-accounts.
Have also considered using a Web Link Collector and send emails outside of SurveyMonkey. The challenge with that seems to be:
Can't register [CustomData] with the responses, which is vital for the analysis, without adding potentially large dropdowns inside the survey itself.
The Survey URL is not unique in terms of forwarding it, although this can be an acceptable risk.
Thanks a lot, any ideas or feedback is appreciated.
Thanks to Tony at SurveyMonkey this was solved by him pointing to Custom Variables in the Platinum version, then adding these to a Web Link Collector and sending the HTML email from our integrating application.
http://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/What-are-custom-variables-and-how-do-I-use-them
The problem with web link collector is that there is no way to track response rate since SurveyMonkey doesn't know how many links were sent out. I don't know a way around this.
Interested to find out how to embed data from facebook such as a "facepile" into an email that is generated server side. Can only find doco on adding to a web page.
Realise the email can not using javascript to grab realtime data in the email but interested in grabbing a snap shot in time of the "facepile" and adding that to an email.
ie static content
Also interested in doing the same thing with a facebook "activity feed".
Theoretically yes, but it's incredibly unlikely that any email client will render client-side javascript or iframes, which means effectively there's no point in trying to do this as best-case scenario is that the majority of people will get a broken email, and the rest will have the email automatically blocked or deleted because of the javascript
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).
I'm sorry if this is duplicating another post. I have a possible answer to a question in another post but I'm not sure if its a good solution and I wanted to ask people for their views.
The problem is the one raised in this post, how to protect emails from spam bots.
Rather than have the addresses on the page, split into different vars and then assembled by JavaScript, I send an ajax request to the server (just a GET to the welcome_controller) with a key ie 'address_id_42' in the params and it returns a mailto link which is then inserted into the page.
Is there any gain by not having any address data on the page initially? Is any advantage immediately lost by the fact the server will just hand out mailto links if you send it the right address id?
I could easily extend it so the server replies with some custom structure which gets unraveled by the js, but I agree that really this is not the right place to focus and that better spam filtering is the way forward, but I'm interesting in what people think to using ajax as a level of obfuscation?
Cheers :)
It depends on the kind of website it is.
Is the page only accessible after authentication (login)?
Is there another (simpler) way of doing it rather than getting it using AJAX?
The answer to your question really depends on these things.
But in a general way, yes, it might help. But such AJAX requests should only be triggered by some "humanly" action like clicking on "show email" button or something like that.
Also you could convert the email text to an image (which I believe is pretty easy to do with PHP).
Also other solutions could involve separating the two parts of the email address (part before and after '#' symbol) by putting them in different 'spans' etc.
I think obfuscating content through AJAX is a great idea. However, you can also try ready to use third party implementations like Mailhide instead of building all of this yourself. You get an additional layer of security by making the user fill up a CAPTCHA before the email address is revealed.
I am using a salesforce workflow to send out product information and invoices to clients but I am running into problems thinking of how to verify if a client receives the email and or opens it. Is there any way to prove that a client received my inventory list or invoice? Doing some prior research on this subject I have come across the following suggestions:
Adding a 1x1 invisible image to the email with a unique id
Adding a regular image instead of a 1x1, maybe company logo
Having the recipient click a link to see the invoice
With all these solutions, you have to detect image requests or link request for them and extract/produce a unique id for each client. I am not really sure how to do this in salesforce so any help would be appreciated, along with other detection ideas.
If you have Salesforce Content, there are some ways to expose documents to clients with the features you need. Basically you'll send an email with link and later you can track confirmation of opening, count how many times was it downloaded.. You can also set the expiration date to the document (can't be downloaded anymore after the date).
As for "pure" email from Apex/Visualforce and basically manually recreating the Content's functionality... nowadays most mail clients block external pictures unless explicitly allowed by the mail recipient, so I suspect you'll have poor track of emails marked as opened. Probably you could create a small Visualforce page (no header, no styles, just controller that makes update "invoice viewed" in the database). Display image from Documents on this page (make sure it's "externally available image") or even just display 1 pixel encoded in base64...