I have a Chrome extension which adds new functionalities to the Gmail interface.
I'm trying to create email "templates" which have a default header, footer and signature (using html, images & css). I want to open these templates in order to edit and send them, just filling the actual content of the email.
I was wondering if there is any way to open these emails directly into the Gmail Compose Window or something like that. Maybe there is a parameter to do this using the URL, like: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&id=xxxxxxx.
I've tried loading the template using the body parameter, but it seems that it doesn't support html.
Any ideas?
Finally, I've found a way to open a mail directly into the "Compose" Window, ready to be edited and sent. It's so simple that I can not believe it takes me 2 days to figure it out:
Just use the url:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/[accountNumber]/?zx=#[tag]?compose=[MailID]
accountNumber is useful if you have two or more accounts at the same time
tag its the mail list that you want to see behind the compose window (ussually inbox).
MailId ... well, the Gmail Message ID.
For instance, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?zx=#inbox?compose=14bbb0dae14fec1f will open the inbox of your first account with a Compose Window opened and pre-populated with the e-mail data.
There is already a feature called "canned Response" in current gmail compose window which is probably solving the same problem that you are trying to solve with your extension.
well I am not sure URL has html support or not but I think it should not support it to protect user from cross-site scripting attacks.
you can also consider Gmail rest API if you want to compose gmail message with your own custom template but using this you may have to do lots of things from scratch.
Related
Context of what I'm trying to accomplish:
User shares a file with the bot
Other users interact with the bot via a dialog
The bot shares the original file to the other users
For example, we want to share a file to the bot that contains this week's cafeteria menu. Each time users would interact with the bot in a certain way, it would share the cafeteria menu with them so that they can consult it.
I've tried calling files.share method but bots can't perform this action (get invalid token type error).
As far as I can tell, there is no way to do this currently. I've tried link unfurling in the message body but that only works if the file itself was already shared to the user. If not, the link simply won't unfurl and clicking it will fail.
The bot can perform a files.upload call and re-upload the contents of the file to each user individually. This seems incredibly wasteful but appears to be the only way to work currently.
Is there something I'm missing?
The reason your bot can not use file.share is that this is an undocumented API method and you need a legacy token to use it. No other token (user token, bot token) will work, because it requires the post scope, which only exists for legacy token.
Approach A: Legacy Token
So one approach would be to use a legacy token with your bot, which you can create here for your current workspace. That should work nicely if your Slack app is only used on your "own" Slack workspace where you can create and use a legacy token.
Approach B: File Mention
Another approach is to use the mention feature in messages to share a file. This works by sending the private link (url_private property) of an already shared file in a message to a new channel. This will automatically re-share the file in that channel. I believe this only works with files that how been previously shares in a public channel and can therefore be re-shared. Be aware though that the file mention feature is currently being reworked, so this behavior might change.
Example:
https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage?token=TOKEN&channel=CHANNEL&as_user=true&text=URL_PRIVATE
For more details see the Slack tutorial Storing, retrieving, and modifying file uploads.
Approach C: External File / image file
If you host your file externally or create a public URL for a file uploaded to Slack you can share it in every channel by just adding the URL to a message. Slack will automatically unfurl it and therefore share it to the user in any channel. This is different to Approach B, because its not a file mention and requires a public URL. You get the public URL of an uploaded file by calling files.sharedPublicURL.
If i'm not wrong, you can do like this :
you share a file with your bot
you retrieve the file shared ID, so his url_private property (cf https://api.slack.com/types/file#authentication)
you then donwload the file
you can then re-share it several times later (without re-uploading to each user)...
I am writting a custom slack command that implements a
task manager like interface (I know ... there are many out there :-), mine interfaces with odesk/upwork to outsource my micro-tasks :-) ) .
Anyway, I like a lot how the /remind command included Complete Delete etc links in its output to facilitate subsequent interactions with the user that entered the command and I am trying to figure out how to do the same trick.
What I have thought so far is to include links in my output that are ... GET /slack-link?method=POST&token=xxx&team_id=xx&command=.. ie carry in their query string the complete json payload that slack would have produced from a normal custom command. slack-link acts as a "proxy" whose sole role is to submit a POST back to my normal slack endpoint. I can even reuse the same response_url for these command-links.
I have not tried it but I think these URLs will just open another window so that path wont exactly work...
Has anybody tried something like that before?
As you've learned, those are currently only available to built-in commands. However, as I was curious and wanted to know how those are done, I looked in the API and found out that the URLs are just formatted normally but have a special "protocol":
You asked me to remind you to “test”.
_<slack-action://BSLACKBOT/reminders/complete/D01234567/1234//0/0/5678|Mark as complete>
or remind me later: <slack-action://BSLACKBOT/reminders/snooze/D01234567/1234//0/0/5678/15|15 mins> [...]
Clicking on such a link results in an API request to method chat.action, with the following parameters:
bot: BSLACKBOT
payload: reminders/complete/D01234567/1234//0/0/5678
token: xoxs-tokenhere-nowayiampostingithere
So it looks like those URLs have three parts:
<slack-action://BSLACKBOT/reminders/complete/[...]|Mark as complete>
slack-action://: the "protocol" like prefix to let Slack know this is a chat action URL.
BSLACKBOT: the bot which (who?) will receive the payload. Can only be a bot user and the ID must start with B, or the API request will fail with invalid_bot.
the rest of the URL: the payload that gets passed to the bot. It doesn't look like this is parsed nor handled specially by Slack.
This is actually not a new feature, since they used to have API URLs back in late 2013 or early 2014 (I don't remember precisely) which they removed for "security reasons".
It could be interesting to see if we can use chat actions with custom bots, and if so, what we could do with it.
I got the answer from Slack support:
In regard to your original question: currently Slack doesn't provide
the ability to embed 'action' links in our custom integrations. Only
built-in features like /remind can utilize these at the moment. For
external services, you'll need to link to a URL that opens in an
external web browser.
We do hope to provide a similar function for custom integrations in
the future, allowing for interactive messages.
Thanks,
Ben
I want an E-Mail to be sent using a background process whenever an Invite was generated.
What I currently have is this approach: The Invite model has the method send_mail, which sends an E-Mail using the Mandrill API and gem. It also has the method queue_mail adds InviteMailer with the invite's ID to the queue using Resque.
However… Since I'm having sort of a really hard time writing specs for this, I assume this might not be the best approach to send mails.
What I mainly want and need to test:
was the mail added to the queue?
is InviteMailer working properly?
does the mail contain the correct vital information?
Vital informations are: sent to the correct person, contains a link to a specific site and some specific data/text; also I'm not sure how to get the current host to the link.
I don't think this is a rare thing to do, so I wonder what the best practices are.
My testing environment: rspec, capybara, factory girl. I already added VCR, to cache the API-request.
You can use Mailcatcher to fake your mail server, and check received mail via web API:
Features
Catches all mail and stores it for display.
Shows HTML, Plain Text and Source version of messages, as applicable.
Rewrites HTML enabling display of embedded, inline images/etc and open links in a new window. (currently very basic)
Can send HTML for analysis by Fractal.
Lists attachments and allows separate downloading of parts.
Download original email to view in your native mail client(s).
Command line options to override the default SMTP/HTTP IP and port settings.
Mail appears instantly if your browser supports WebSockets, otherwise updates every thirty seconds.
Growl notifications when you receive a new message.
Runs as a daemon run in the background.
Sendmail-analogue command, catchmail, makes using mailcatcher from PHP a lot easier.
Written super-simply in EventMachine, easy to dig in and change.
How
gem install mailcatcher
mailcatcher
Go to http://localhost:1080/
Send mail through smtp://localhost:1025
API
A fairly RESTful URL schema means you can download a list of messages
in JSON from /messages, each message's metadata with
/messages/:id.json, and then the pertinent parts with
/messages/:id.html and /messages/:id.plain for the default HTML
and plain text version, /messages/:id/:cid for individual
attachments by CID, or the whole message with /messages/:id.source.
I have awebsite, lets just call it search, in one of my browserpages open. search has a form, which when submitted runs queries on a database to which I don't have direct access. The problem with search is that the interface is rather horrible (one cannot save the aforementioned queries etc.)
I've analyzed the request (with a proxy) which is send to the server via search and I am able to replicate it. The server even sends back the correct result, but the browser is not able to open it. (Same origin policy). Do you have any ideas on how I could tackle this problem?
The answer to your question is: you can't. At least not without using a proxy as suggested in the answer by Walter, and that would mean your web site visitors would have to knowingly login to your web site using their other web site's credentials (hmm doesn't sound good...)
The reason you can't do this is related to security, if you could run a script on the tab next to the one with the site open (which is what I'm guessing you want to do), you would be able to do a CSRF attack and get any data you wish and send it to hack.com
This is, of course, assuming that there has to be a login somewhere in the process, otherwise there's no reason for you to not be able to create a simple form which posts the required query and gets the info.
If you did have access to the mentioned website, you would be able to support cross domain xml using JSONP.
It is not possible to bypass the same origin policy in javascript (assuming that you want to do it with that considering your question). You need to set up a proxy server side that is doing the request for you and returns the html.
A simple way of doing this in PHP would be like this:
<?php
echo file_get_contents("http://searchdomainname.com" . "?" . http_build_query($_GET, '', '&'));
?>
I am currently using Grails Mail 1.0 plugin in my project. I used it to send verification link to registrant's email address. Unfortunately, the sent verification link is not clickable on some webmail services like hotmail and yahoo mail. I have also encountered same problem with other web browsers like mozilla and google chrome. Is this really a bug on the said plugin? Please help!
Is this really a bug on the said plugin?
Almost certainly not. I use the same plugin to send HTML emails and they render fine in Yahoo mail.
In general, you shouldn't rely on links in HTML email being rendered correctly, because some email programs may be configured to only read emails in plain text format. Also, the rendering of HTML content varies wildly from one email program to another.
For these reasons, you should generally provide a plain-text fallback, e.g.
To register, click here. If you're using
a rubbish email program, you won't be able to click the link, so
copy-paste the following link into your browser's address bar:
http://www.example.org