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.
Related
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.
Although I know a lot of email clients will pre-fetch or otherwise cache images. I am unaware of any that pre-fetch regular links like some link
Is this a practice done by some emails? If it is, is there a sort of no-follow type of rel attribute that can be added to the link to help prevent this?
As of Feb 2017 Outlook (https://outlook.live.com/) scans emails arriving in your inbox and it sends all found URLs to Bing, to be indexed by Bing crawler.
This effectively makes all one-time use links like login/pass-reset/etc useless.
(Users of my service were complaining that one-time login links don't work for some of them and it appeared that BingPreview/1.0b is hitting the URL before the user even opens the inbox)
Drupal seems to be experiencing the same problem: https://www.drupal.org/node/2828034
Although I know a lot of email clients will pre-fetch or otherwise cache images.
That is not even a given already.
Many email clients – be they web-based, or standalone applications – have privacy controls that prevent images from being automatically loaded, to prevent tracking of who read a (specific) email.
On the other hand, there’s clients like f.e. gmail’s web interface, that tries to establish the standard of downloading all referenced external images, presumably to mitigate/invalidate such attempts at user tracking – if a large majority of gmail users have those images downloaded automatically, whether they actually opened the email or not, the data that can be gained for analytical purposes becomes watered down.
I am unaware of any that pre-fetch regular links like some link
Let’s stay on gmail for example purposes, but others will behave similarly: Since Google is always interested in “what’s out there on the web”, it is highly likely that their crawlers will follow that link to see what it contains/leads to – for their own indexing purposes.
If it is, is there a sort of no-follow type of rel attribute that can be added to the link to help prevent this?
rel=no-follow concerns ranking rather than crawling, and a no-index (either in robots.txt or via meta element/rel attribute) also won’t keep nosy bots from at least requesting the URL.
Plus, other clients involved – such as a firewall/anti-virus/anti-madware – might also request it for analytical purposes without any user actively triggering it.
If you want to be (relatively) sure that any action is triggered only by a (specific) human user, then use URLs in emails or other kind of messages over the internet only to lead them to a website where they confirm an action to be taken via a form, using method=POST; whether some kind of authentication or CSRF protection might also be needed, might go a little beyond the context of this question.
All Common email clients do not have crawlers to search or pre-build <a> tag related documents if that is what you're asking, as trying to pre-build and cache a web location could be an immense task if the page is dynamic or of large enough size.
Images are stored locally to reduce load time of the email which is a convenience factor and network load reduction, but when you open an email hyperlink it will load it in your web browser rather than email client.
I just ran a test using analytics to report any server traffic, and an email containing just
linktomysite
did not throw any resulting crawls to the site from outlook07, outlook10, thunderbird, or apple mail(yosemite). You could try using a wireshark scan to check for network traffic from the client to specific outgoing IP's if you're really interested
You won't find any native email clients that do that, but you could come across some "web accelerators" that, when using a web-based email, could try to pre-fetch links. I've never seen anything to prevent it.
Links (GETs) aren't supposed to "do" anything, only a POST is. For example, your "unsubscribe me" link in your email should not directly unsubscribe th subscriber. It should "GET" a page the subscriber can then post from.
W3 does a good job of how you should expect a GET to work (caching, etc.)
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_httpmethods.asp
I'm attempting to make a mail client that is HTML5/JS only where users would have to define their mail server and credentials.
I've surfed google leading to dead ends and figured that this is the next best place (or superuser.com).
I was thinking of using HTML5 WebSocket if I could to make the connection to the server but I don't know enough of smtp, imap, or pop3's architecture to understand how javascript could pass the args and perform what I want it to do.
PHP cannot be involved in this project otherwise I wouldn't be asking the question.
Any help in locating this would be fantastic.
Nothing is impossible. Except this.
In standard HTML or JavaScript, you can't make raw-socket connections, which is what you'd need to speak any of the protocols you've listed. The WebSocket API doesn't help you, because the server must also speak WebSockets, and mail servers don't. This is actually all a good thing, though. Imagine if you visited a random website and it telnetted to your home router, setting it on fire and burning down your house. That's what websites would be able to do if they could initiate plain TCP socket connections.
You have a few options I can think of, neither of which involves building a webpage. (And to be clear, you didn't say your project had to be a webpage; you merely said HTML/JS, so these are indeed legitimate options.)
First is something like node-webkit. As the readme says, "You can write native apps in HTML and Javascript with node-webkit." You'll still have to distribute it as a native app, because that's what it is.
Second is a Chrome app, specifically using the chrome.socket API. But have fun writing a TLS layer over those sockets, which you'll find is a requirement for almost any mail server these days. If you succeed in doing that, you'll be able to distribute your mail client in the Chrome Web Store, where I assure you an email client will be quite popular.
Third, write a webserver that operates locally, so your users will visit something like http://localhost:9999/mail in their browser. This will be a real pain to distribute, but you can use almost any technology you want.
I'm sure there's a fourth valid option, and someone else can chime in on that one.
Best of luck.
Is it possible to embed an interactive Google Map in an email?
I know it is possible with static maps, but I'm starting to doubt if it is possible with interactive ones.
No.
I don't even know whether the map uses Javascript, Flash, Java, HTML5, or anything else, but I can still confidently say 'no'.
There's virtually no chance that your recipient's mail client will support it.
You might come across some mail clients (most likely webmails) that haven't blocked that kind of content, but that will almost certainly be an oversight on their part.
No decent mail software is going to support it, because the technologies involved are either complex or a security risk to the end user.
And even if some newer mail clients were to somehow provide support for it, you need to consider that many people have old email clients. It's commonly said that you have to design emails like it's 1999.
The best you will be able to do is include a link in your message, to a hosted map.
I just realized that I don't have a answer to this question, when I'm talking some friends we can't find the best simple solution to do this.
Can I send a dynamically body, from a form with a prefixed subject? My question is about the most simple solution.
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You cannot do this in general without some server side help.
Plain html does not offer support for it.
Usually a link as proposed by Simon will do the trick, but this will not work for everyone.
Javascript and Java client scripting suffer from the "same origin" limitation, meaning that you have to deliver to the same server, unless the user jumps through hoops to allow the script to connect to other hosts.
There are many scripts available to do this.
You can launch the user's email program using a mailto link along with several paramaters:
mailto:foo#example.com?subject=hi&body=hello,%20world!
However, a lot of people use webmail nowadays, for which it won't work - so the best option is to avoid using email. If you want feedback and don't want to host such a script on your own server, you can use a service such as PollDaddy or SurveyMonkey for this. If you want to encourage users to share a page with friends, ShareThis supports email.