No response after filling in the Email Markup registration - google-schemas

Sent registration Gmail Email markUp (adding schemas to the templates of letters)
I sent a letter with a markup to
schema.whitelisting+sample#gmail.com
and passed the test
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-tester/u/0/?hl=ru
Foldings did not come, and more than a week there is no answer.
Tell me, what is the approximate length of the answer, should the pile come and should I write again?

As per my experience in requesting to whitelist a specific email address, usually, it takes about 2 weeks in total to complete the process. Just make sure that the following guidelines in this documentation was met to avoid rejection.

will everyone get a reply if application was rejected or approved?

Related

Email clients access my webapp with changed / strange URLs

For a few years now I observe a strange behaviour, most likely triggered by enduser's email clients using my webapp (Ruby on Rails system, doesn't matter tho).
I am running a mid sized business and send out thousands of mails to my customers each month who buy leads from me.
The emails include two links, one to buy the lead and the other to give feedback. There is a dynamic part in both URLs which is a UUID, example:
offer/968ec0c1-e105-4c70-95b2-fd0c799b58f3
and
feedback/968ec0c1-e105-4c70-95b2-fd0c799b58f3
Every now and then, my webapp gets accessed at the same time on both links (which makes me confident it is not the user since it is the very same second they get accessed) but with different dynamic parts in the url, so i see in my logs
offer/NGVjZjA0YT
and
feedback/NGVjZjA0YT
It is always a random string with a length of 10 chars.
So this is not a big deal since it happens only 1-2 times per week and as far as I can tell no user is really affected by this, but still I wonder what's behind this. Did any of you experience a similar thing?
Maybe an email client wants to crawl / load a preview, seeing an uuid pattern in the url and changes it because whatever?!
I disabled link click tracking in the email sending provider (sendgrid), just as a side note. So they won't / shouldn't replace the email links. Also experienced this when sending links via AWS SES.
Im just curious. Any ideas or experiences? Thanks in advance & have a great day!

Malicious entity slowly creating accounts on asp.net server

I'm not sure that this is a stack overflow appropriate question. If not, I'd appreciate a pointer to a more appropriate forum, as I haven't been able to find one.
I have a small website project that gets a few hundred daily unique users and on average I get one or two people to create an account per day. Yesterday I noticed that more users were signing up (like about 50) and today another 150 users signed up. Wonderful, right? Except that then I noticed that while the emails look legitimate, all of the usernames ended in same letters. My site requires that email be confirmed before a user gets any additional access and none of these accounts have confirmed their email. There is no apparent regularity to the creation of these accounts other than that it is happening with slowly increasing frequency.
My first question is, what is the most effective way to prevent this with the least user impact. The only thing that I can think of is adding a captcha step as part of account registration. I really dislike captcha so if anyone has a better idea for a general solution to this I'd appreciate it.
I'm also interested in this: What could this malicious user be gaining by doing this? It's not yet anything other than a minor nuisance to me. The accounts are easily identifiable and they're not (yet) being created at a rate that could represent anything like a denial of service attack. The only thing I can think is that they're trying to confirm that these emails are registered on my site. But I can't think why that would be useful. Also, if the email addresses are real, they're using my site to spam those email, but the spam is a registration confirmation for my site. So I guess they might eventually get my email provider to shut me down if they keep this up.
Thanks in advance for any help, even if that's a redirect to a different forum.
Other possibly useful information:
My site is hosted on Azure using asp.net mvc5 with identity framework
I believe that the emails are legitimate because my email provider
shows a very small bounce rate (like 1%) on these emails.
There are 2 more options which are SMS-Confirmation(by limiting the phone number), and IP restriction.

Set time limit on POST form in Rails

I got a website where you can sign up for newsletters. Signing up does only take a click from the user to register it's email in the database. I figured that this might be a problem since there's no cooldown/time limit or what so ever, so i guess it would be possible to make some kinda script to spam my database with emails.
I've been thinking of implementing a Captcha or something, but I'd rather go with some kind of cooldown on signing up. Something like, you can only sign up 2 emails each 15 minutes, or something like that. What would be the best solution here?
The method you use is single opt-in. It's no only inefficient but also possible illegal.
For inefficiency, the reason is you may get lots of invalid emails and your system is busy to send emails to these invalid addresses. The reason may come from spam trying and users' errors.
For legal, in Europe you can only send emails to people who opted in your service. The only valid way to prove they are opted in is they have confirmed opt-in link in email. http://www.lsoft.com/resources/optinlaws.asp. Having their emails alone is not a valid reason because you can buy emails from others.
So, the correct strategy is to use double opt-in. When a user fill email and submit, he will get an email asking his confirmation of this action. Once confirmed, he would be a valid subscriber and start to get emails.
Also, with double opt-in, your concern of junk opt-ins will be minimum because it becomes harder to spammers to confirm email, also they don't have too much motivation to do that.
If you have a signup table, you can check the for the number of signups from a particular user in the last 15 minutes
Signup.where("user_id = ? and created_at >= ?", user_id, 15.minutes.ago).count
If the above count is greater than or equal to 2, then don't allow

Generating a new email address on the fly, but not really!

I have a blogging application. Once a blog-post is created by a user, it will be sent as an email to some of user's friends. I want a functionality where the friends will just reply to the email and the content of the email will go as comments for that particular blog-post.
One way to do this is to do something similar to what http://ohlife.com does. It basically creates a unique ID per user per day, has the reply-to attribute of the email set to post+{unique_id}#ohlife.com and probably parses this field to know which user is the email for, when it gets received. But it really has only 1 email address which is post#ohlife.com. The part after the "+" get's ignored by email servers. This also is applicable to gmail.
What I wanted to know, is whether this property is for particular email servers or is it universal? If it is not universal, is there is email server independent way of implementing this? I would not want this to be based on the email subject, as it's the trivial solution I know of.
it is depending on your mail server and how it is configured.. (although it is quite a standard) - for example in postfix:
recipient_delimiter = +
you could set it to anything you like .. i once configured it to be a dot so i can use it all over the web.. http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#recipient_delimiter
but you could simply make it configurable in your application as well..
Besides using the email subject or address, one other easy way to accomplish this would be to just stick an identifier number at the bottom of the outgoing email's body. It would then come back to you in the quoted part of the response message. This is much less obtrusive than putting stuff in the subject or address, and if you're using HTML messages you can even make the code invisible.

Is a billing address required by PayPal's Website Payments Pro?

I'm creating a website with rails that sells a virtual service, and therefore don't really want to validate the billing address for credit card transactions.
From what I have read on paypal (page 14 of this pdf) and other resources i have looked at, this should be totally possible. However, when I submit a purchase or an authorize request to paypal with ActiveMerchant I get back the error "Please enter a complete billing address."
Just in case I was doing something incorrectly I copied the code from Railscast 144 (using my own login, password, etc) Even with this code I continue to get the error.
Is there something I'm overlooking?
Some setting I have to change on Paypal's side?
Or is a billing address now required?
Thanks for your help
Alex
Yes, the billing address is now required even though they do not mention it in their docs. IIRC they changed this right after I did that episode. If you check out the next episode you can see billing address is required.
That said, there may be a setting to turn this requirement off, I have not looked.
A billing address is required, and it seems kind of nonsensical that you say you don't care about the billing address because you're selling a virtual service. Is your business model based on not caring whether someone's using a credit card fraudulently? I don't think that's really going to work out for you, if so.
yes it is, but the api doesn't tell you that. weird, i know. it really doesn't tell you that when you get into recurring billing too. fun times.

Resources