In developing our docusign application, we need to use real emails addresses (to test the addressing logic, etc.) but we do not want those users to get all the development envelopes. In our own code, we handle this using mailtrap.io, a custom SMTP service that traps emails and sends them all to a common inbox that developers can review. Is there a way to do something similar in your docusign developer account, where you would be using real email addresses, but they would not actually go the intended user.
thanks,
~Bill
Thanks for any help
No, you cannot. The emails are sent from DocuSign.
If you want to test the real thing, completely real, then it also includes emails being sent.
If you are ok making any change, so it's not 100% like the real thing, I would suggest to take your email address and change the domain (mailinator.com or your own internal domain) this is a change, yes, but also changing the SMTP server is a change, so in either case - you are not doing 100% what the real app will do.
The emails can also be suppressed (by changing account settings in DocuSign), but again, that won't test the real thing if that's what you need.
Related
I have tried to have my SMTP server with exim4 for a while to send ecommerce registration and transaction confirms.
I followed all the good rules, like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, SMTP encryption. The postmaster tool by google said the IP has a good reputation and there are not spam traffic.
I reached a antispam test result of 10/10 using https://www.mail-tester.com/ or some similar tools.
But everything was not enough, my ecommerce registration messages are sent to spam by Gmail and it is the same with some other famous providers. I have understood I can't do nothing against.
Then, what is a good solution for user registration for an ecommerce? How can I reduce the messages delivered to spam folder?
I'm afraid you haven't provided enough information to identify the problem.
Hundreds of factors can contribute to deliverability outcomes; it's not as simple as setting up authentication, reverse DNS, etc. In addition, no free mail tester can accurately tell you how your deliverability will be at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc., because mail testers don't have the same data those ISPs use to make spam filtering decisions.
If you want more reliable deliverability, it's generally easiest to use a transactional email service to send email, rather than trying to run an SMTP server yourself. There are occasional exceptions to this, but because most senders will have an easier time using one of these services, it's almost always the first thing to try.
(How do email services provide better deliverability? A number of ways, but I think the biggest difference is that they can more closely manage the email sending reputation of their IP ranges. Having anti-spam systems built into the service enables them to resolve problems that much faster, compared to hosting providers which tend to have fewer tools and less data available to stop spammers, so their IP ranges' sending reputation is usually worse.)
Here is something you can try that may help.
Use a 3rd-party delivery provider (AWS SES, SendGrid, Mailgun) with a Good IP reputation. Here's a list of places you can check their IP reputation https://www.helloinbox.email/#reputation (Talos and Barracuda).
Use a subdomain to send transactional emails (email.example.com).
Let me know if that doesn't work.
There are couple of ways for a website to know where a user comes from, like search engine, social platforms, email newsletter, etc. Great way to monitor traffic and assess campaigns.
If a website sends regular newsletter, it also gives the option of managing subscriptions. One clicks on the link and can choose to set the frequency or entirely stop letters altogether among other settings.
But what if, for eg, A sends the newsletter to her friend B, B somehow decides to stop receiving any mails from A decides to unsubscribe! But effectively A gets screwed.
So is there anyway for a website to know that the request to get unsubscribed actually came from another email account and not its original subscriber?
I am not aware if Mailchimp or other services know how to handle this, so pls guide me so.
Of course there are couple of other ways to authenticate like to login and then change but I have seen many newsletter straight away unsubscribing without even confirming the request. I am not aware if they do some sort of check before doing that. But this can also be used to tell something to the website about its letter, like A forwarded to B but B did not like.
Thanks.
The only way you can expect to be able to identify a user in this way is to see of they have a cookie previously issued with a session, that you can associate with the user's account, that was authenticated by a login on your site.
Alternately, you can ask users to email the word "unsubscribe" in a message from the original account instead of depending on a link.
Let's imagine that I have a site with some features that require email validation (eg. user registration). Of course I will validate emails using regex but once upon a time I saw SMTP validation in someone else's code. What good and bad sides has SMTP validation?
I can assume the following pros and cons:
Pros:
We can check out some email addresses for existence (not all SMTP servers allows this feature).
Cons:
Our site can be blocked.
Maybe we can use this to make webserver going down. Webserver will take domain part of email address and make request to it. We can create fake SMTP server that will receive request but will make great delay to response. Maybe if we force webserver to make dozens of such checks it will not be able to answer other clients.
Not all SMTP servers provide this capability.
Please be constructive.
"SMTP Validation" I assume refers to the SMTP VRFY command, and in this day and age you would be a fool to trust in it. It's a great feature if you're a spammer because it allows you to enumerate email addresses for a given server.
No one in their right mind will expose this command to the internet and have it respond with anything other than 252 send some mail, i'll try my best, aka "I'm only going to validate email addresses during an actual mail transaction".
The only sane use of VRFY these days is as an internal interface between a spam filtering appliance and the mail server hiding behind it.
TL;DR Don't use "SMTP Validation", it will be horribly unreliable at best.
If you want to validate that a user has entered a valid email address, then send it an email with an activation link/code.
In addition to Sammitch's answer, there are email validation services available via API that can provide SMTP validation - sometimes down to the mailbox level - for reasonable prices.
You can find these with a simple Google search, but I'm told LeadSpend and QAS (an Experian subsidiary) are among the best of the bunch.
TL;DR - Any webapp devs out there able to squeeze performance out of using gmail as SMTP server without a 3-10 minute delay to delivery?
I'm looking for some feedback from developers who are using gmail as a secure SMTP server for use with Webapps.
Within the past 2 weeks, my company has switched to gmail to host email for our domains.
I have a few webapps that send from our ISP server, but I'd like to refactor the code to use gmail with our domain name. I know the ISP can rig things up, but I don't want relay issues.
I have gmail sending for the Webapps and it's more or less working. On ASP/IIS, I'm using SSL and on PHP Linux, I'm using TLS.
It seems that TLS (port 587) works better than plain old SSL (port 465), but the overall performance difference seems minimal.
What concerns me is that there is often a significant delay (10-20 minutes at times) to get email to a recipient no matter which method I use to send via gmail.
While I understand this can happen in any environment, I am used to fast delivery. Use case is salespeople talking to customers and needing to get email to them very quickly using the Webapp. Before the gmail switch, usually less than a minute to deliver. Now, it is 3-4 minutes minimum.
Am I crazy to try to use gmail for this purpose? There seem to be a lot of devs using it, so just wanting to know how it works out for them/you.
Thanks for any feedback!
Ive found gmail problematic for another reason... Grey listing. My application happy works away using gmail smtp and then every now and then just stops working. Manually logging into the gmail web interface and entering a captcha "unlocks" the account and my application can send mail again. Seems at some point google determines that I may be sending spam and locks my account...? Feels like sending automated mail through gmail is a risky idea IMHO
Just a shot in the dark, but may it have to do with additional outgoing mail spam checking and therefore long output queues on GMail's side and (at least in some cases) greylisting?
To elaborate on that:
Google is known to take things seriously. Hosting a mail service that may be used by everyone nowadays is a bit of a hassle. One user posting spam/viruses through your service and bam! your servers are on someones blacklist. Therefore, additional checking on outgoing mail would be a good idea, but the mail may take longer (especially in a distributed server environment where the mail has to pass several message queues ... from the incoming ESMTP server to the spam checker to the virus checker to the message storage to the outgoing mail queue to the outgoing mail SMTP service).
If a recipient uses greylisting, his mail server first rejects a mail by stating a temporary problem, remembering the sender address and/or the message id and telling the sending server to try again later. Most spammers do not try again. But GMail's servers will try again, but due to long message queues and/or long retry intervals it will be delayed further.
And, as Ryan already stated, try to get one of the most delayed mails into your hands, including all mail headers. Check the timestamps on the Received: headers and find out which server is the bottleneck. Then you'll have at least an idea where it goes wrong.
Gmail has a pretty nice step-by-step resolution process on their support site.
Here is a direct link
You will want to do some more digging to try and isolate the issue. I'm rather surprised you are seeing 10 - 20 minute delays. One thing to look at is the email message header. This will give you a good idea how long each hop is taking. There could be an issue somewhere else that you don't know about.
I doubt you are going to be able to get your email sending as fast as it was in-house. It just comes with the territory.
On my server, debian with plesk and postfix mailserver, i seen that using gmail took a bit of time to sent the mail (~2-3 seconds to send the mail via php using phpmailer), but the mails usually arrive in 1~2 minutes.
Seldom happens that the deliver took about 10 minutes.
Using posix, instead, php send email faster, but they take more times to be delivered (in true, php is faster delivering the mail at the mail server, but then the mail server is slower to deliver the mail to the recipient).. and is a nightmare with spam.
This is my experience, my 2 cents ;)
I am building an email marketing application, and in that I want to provide a functionality for the user to view his html mails in different mail clients. How can I create this? Please help.
You might also want to check out Email on Acid - they have an API out that is cheaper than Pivotal Veracity and Litmus and their results are generally much faster.
Any email client will either use its own inbuilt HTML renderer/viewer(which generally will be a standards compliant) or the default one set on that particular OS. So if your email template looks same on all the browsers, it should show the same on all email clients. Check this from mailchimp
Interesting question!
To get useful results, you would have to actually render the E-Mail in each client. There is zero chance to do that within a client application, due to a multitude of platform and licensing issues.
The only way I can see is building some sort of web service, running on a server on which each client runs using a scripting engine (maybe with virtual machines for the various platforms, Windows, Mac OS, Linux...), and making screen shots of the rendered result, similar to what browsershots does for browsers.
While that is not impossible - you may even be able to use browsershots as a basis - it's going to be tough to set up, and possibly expensive as you would have to buy a number of commercial mail clients (Outlook, Lotus...)
You might be able to gain a big competitive edge by implementing this, but the effort would be huge.
The only viable option is to actually have the email rendered in a set of email clients, with the user of your service being given screenshots of the output.
The whole process can be automated. See how Litmus does this.
We've used a company called Pivotal Veracity in the past. Basically, you send your test email to an email address they provide and then you log in to their application to see how it renders in different email clients (even web clients). You can view the email as it would look with images on or images off.