Can I register with Google for markup emails without sending hundreds of emails before? - google-schemas

I read the guidelines and I have a problem with "Consistent history of sending a high volume of mail from your domain (order of hundred emails a day minimum to Gmail) for a few weeks at least." The thing is, I need RSVP buttons for an internal application that manages leaves and holidays, and the particular email address we created for our app does not send any other messages. So I can't possibly send "hundreds of emails" in order to prove that I'm not spamming anyone. If I describe the situation in the registration form, can I get a pass?

#SilviaFilip, I see that you've mentioned internal app. If your domain is a Google Apps for Work/Education domain, you can request to have that registered. This will give you capability to send Gmail schemas internally to users within your domain.
If you need to send to external domains this will not fit your use case. Additionally, if you don't have a Google Apps domain, unfortunately, it looks like you will have to fulfill their guidelines.

Related

Is approval-based sign-ups possible with Slack?

Normally, I invite new members via. email, that I get from them individually.
Let's say I want to campaign publicly for volunteers to join our community, then what is the best approaches with various level of control?
It is not possible out-of-the-box, but you can develop a custom website, where people can apply for your Slack and enter the name and email address.
You can then forward their request for you to approve (e.g. a page with a table of all open requests where each can be approved or denied or an automatically generated email to you etc).
Finally you can auto-invite every approved user with his email address. The Slack API has an undocumented API function that allows that. Check here for my post about that method.
I have done a similar website for inviting people from a gaming community (Eve Online), where they have to first authenticate themselves with their game login before getting an invite to our Slack. It works pretty well. I made this website with PHP, but basically every server based script language will work.

Features of Mandrill API

I am new to Mandrill and its integration. Can anyone help me to figure out the advantages of using Mandrill? What can be done using Mandrill other than sending messages and tracking them?
Mandrill has many uses. You might have seen those on their website itself. Actually its a Mail Transaporter like PHP mailer, but it uses their own server for sending mails.
As said on their website,
Mandrill runs on a globally distributed infrastructure that can
deliver emails in milliseconds.
This is because when you send a mail through their SMTP or send.json (API) method, the send mail possibly see the fastest path algorithm to deliver a mail. That's why it take milliseconds to deliver. They have ~7 different mail servers worldwide for this.
Major Features,
Sending mails fastly than our own server using PHP Mailer.
Sending mails via pre-designed templates which can be reusable by the merge vars we're using.
Support multiple language platforms like, cURL, JSON, Python, PHP, Ruby, Nodejs, Dart and also their depending frameworks.
It tracks clicks from the mail we sent. For Ex: each and every url link in our sent mails is redirected only after tracking from mandrillapp site. This enables mandrill to track the no of opens in a mail and track analytics.
Through mandrill we can construct our own mail sending application or integrate into an existing application.
It's mostly used for Transactional Messages like functions like welcome mail, forgot password, cart details and etc.
It can be integrated into other shopping cart web applications.
Their api call works on even in the developer environment.
Lesser spam.
Verified domain options like DKIM and SPF settings. This enables the mails to identified by major email providers like gmail, google, etc.
It can be used as SMTP version and can be integrated into major SMTP applications.
Reports: Demographics of email send, Compare status, Which url in our mails has been clicked and no of counts.
Setup rule for delivering emails.
A/B testing, custom SMTP headers, Inbound domains and etc.
There are many other features in developer perspective. If you mention in which platform you're trying to use mandrill addditional details can be provide.
Hope this might help you.
To name a few, You can
1) use templates to do A/B testing ( which allow you to experiment with different templates, and end up with something which is effective).
2) use Embedded images , which will reduce the chance that your emails will end up in spam.
Hope this helps,

Registering with Google Schemas: What is the process when sending from multiple email addresses?

I work for a direct marketing company that sends many emails on behalf of many clients, and we wish to start using Actions in Gmail. I am in charge of heading up the testing of this.
I am concerned about this step in the registration process:
Send a real-life email coming from your production servers (or a
server with similar DKIM/SPF/From:/Return-Path: headers) including the
markup / schema to schema.whitelisting+sample#gmail.com.
Since we will be sending email on behalf of many clients, we will need to send from a multitude of sender addresses. Is it possible to whitelist our company as a whole or will we need to whitelist each email that we wish to send?
For this you have to list all the email id's to be whitelisted or create a common domain and then you can request for whitelisting.
However, in order to whitelist these emails id's the emails you are requesting should be transactional not promotional emails. Like the email notifications that user has been subscribed for or emails related to order processing etc.
You can refer to Actions / Schema Guidelines in this page for more details.
Hope that helps!

Parsing and Receiving Email in iOS

Suppose I have an email address that only receives a specific type of email, i.e. an automatically generated receipt email from a transaction.
I would like to build an iOS app to receive the email text from this email address and parse according to a predefined format and display the results. Is it possible to do this without dealing with the email server directly from the app?
Meaning can I for instance piggyback off the native mail client (assuming it is set up to receive pushed email sent to the email address). I tried looking through Apple's docs for iOS but could not find anything useful. Anyone know of something?
3rd party apps have no way to integrate with the Mail app or to make use of any configured mail account the user has setup on the device.
However, you can write an app that can access external email accounts if the user provides all of the usual email account details. The App Store has several 3rd party mail apps that serve as replacements for Apple's Mail app.
If your app is written to work with a specific email account, and not one entered by the user of the app, then you can hardcode all of the account details in the app.
Your app is basically a run of the mill email client. You just have to know how to access IMAP or POP3 accounts, retrieve the emails, and process them as needed.
Again, there is no way your app can intercept or make use of any emails accessed by any email accounts the user has setup for use with the standard Mail app.
There are at least two aspects to your question:
How do I get an email to open in my iOS app?
Put the data in an attachment and see this link
What format can I use in an email attachment to transport persistent
objects?
I've had decent results with NSKeyedArchive as an interchange format. There are lots of other choices, depending on what generates the receipts attachments.
Post a followup with your choices. Good luck!

Way to up incoming and outgoing mail for a custom mobile app

I am used to building apps in larger infrastructures. In a startup, how do I setup SMTP for a mobile app? Is there a place I can use for hosting this?
There are a couple of possible approaches:
One option is to not attempt to interface with SMTP/IMAP/POP servers directly in your app. You can, alternatively, send emails from your app via MFMessageComposeViewController, which gives you a standard compose email user interface. This is very easy to do.
To handle inbound emails you can let the user receive their emails via the standard Mail app (that way users don't have to go to different places to receive their emails). You integrate inbound emails with your app using a custom URL scheme. You can then send the user an email using this custom URL scheme, and if they get the mail on their iOS device and have that app installed, when they click on the link they will be taken to your app, passing it information from the URL in the email.
For example, if you defined a custom URL scheme of yourapp://, you can just include a hyperlink to that URL in your email (or text message or your web site), and if the user is on their iOS device, when they click on that link, they'll be taken to your app. If you google "iOS custom URL scheme tutorial", you'll see examples of the plist entries you need to make in your app for it to respond to a custom URL scheme. The Implementing Custom URL Schemes reference shows you what sort of changes you need to make to your app delegate to actually pass data in your custom URL to your app.
Alternatively, you can (a) sign up with any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that offers mail hosting; (b) write an app that sends email by connecting to that ISP's SMTP server; and (c) retrieve email by connecting to that ISP's IMAP or POP servers. Clearly you'll have to pay fees to the ISP, the quality of your app is linked to the quality of the ISP you partner with (so pick a good one), and you'll have to do your own SMTP/IMAP/POP integration in your app (and you'll have to write your own code to do that or use a third-party library for that, as this is not standard Cocoa Touch functionality). In my opinion, you'd need a pretty compelling business case to go down this road, though it can be done.
You could avoid email altogether, and develop a web service for letting the users send and receive messages. (This might make sense if the app is just sending messages between users of your app, for example.) Again, you'll have to contract with an ISP for web hosting, and you'll of course have to undertake the non-trivial exercise of writing your web service code. But this is architecturally cleaner than integrating with SMTP/IMAP/POP servers if the purpose of your app to facilitate communication between users of your app.
You haven't provided enough information for us to assess which approach best suits your situation.

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