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!
Related
Rails 6 comes with Action Mailbox now. The documentation and community do not have great resources on how to integrate various services outside of the most common such as SendGrid.
Assuming a person uses Google's Gsuite Gmail:
How could they integrate that with Action Mailbox?
Would one use Gmail's API, or would that not be appropriate for Action Mailbox?
If Gmail doesn't work, what is different about SendGrid that makes it integrate appropriately?
Action Mailbox is built around receiving email from a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) in real time, not periodically fetching email from a mailbox. That is, it receives mail sent via SMTP, it doesn't fetch mail (using IMAP or POP3) from another server that has already received it.
For this to work it is dependent on an external (to Rails) SMTP service receiving the email and then delivering the email to Action Mailbox. These external services are called "Ingresses" and, as at the time of writing, there are 5 available ingresses.
Of the five, four are commercial services that will run the required SMTP servers for you and then "deliver" the email to your application (usually as a JSON payload via a webhook).
Mailgun - scroll down to "Inbound"
Mandrill
Postmark
Sendgrid
You could already use those services in a Rails App and handle the webhooks yourself but Action Mailbox builds a standardised set of functionality on top. Almost like a set of rails to guide and speed the process.
In addition, the fifth ingress is the "Relay" ingress. This allows you to run your own supported MTA (SMTP server) on the same machine and for it to relay the received email to Action Mailbox (usually the raw email). The currently supported MTAs are:
Exim
Postfix
Qmail
To answer your specific questions about Gmail:
How could they integrate that with Action Mailbox?
They couldn't directly. They would need to also set up one of the 7 MTAs listed above and then somehow deliver the emails to that. The delivery could be accomplished with:
Forwarding rules managed by the user at the mailbox level
Dual delivery, split delivery or some other advanced routing rule managed by the admin at the domain level
Would one use Gmail's API, or would that not be appropriate for Action Mailbox?
Even if there were a way to have Gmail fire a webhook on incoming email (I'm not aware of any special delivery options outside the advanced routing rules above), there is currently no way to connect that theoretical webhook to Action Mailbox.
If Gmail doesn't work, what is different about SendGrid that makes it integrate appropriately?
Sendgrid (to use your example, the others work more or less the same way) offers an inbound mail handling API. Just as importantly, the Rails Team has built an incoming email controller to integrate with that API.
Given the lack of Gmail APIs and the lack of a Rails ingress controller, the only way I can think of that you could connect Action Mailbox to an existing Gmail mailbox would be for some other bit of code to check the mailbox, reformat the fetched email and then pose as one of the supported MTAs to deliver it to Action Mailbox.
It would be an interesting exercise and would possibly become a popular gem but it would very much be a kludge. A glorious kludge if done well, but a kludge nonetheless.
Another option would be to leave your example.com domain delivering to Gmail as normal and set up another domain for your Action Mailbox emails. You could use a separate domain, example.org, or a subdomain, app.example.com.
This would involve setting up one of the 7 supported SMTP servers and pointing the MX records for example.org or app.example.com at those servers.
Bonus trivia: Another name for an MTA is a Mail eXchager, hence the name for a DNS mail record is an MX record.
To integrate IMAP with Rails, have a look into the greate mail_room Gem
It's a daemon that you can start alongside your app, which listens onto couple of IMAP inboxes, and then convert those into either a Sidekiq Worker or push it via http to your app.
It's used by Gitlab for their mail interactions (Answer to thread, create issue by writing to an email).
They also have a section on how to integrate with ActionMailbox.
If you were dead set on doing this, Gmail has had IMAP IDLE (push) support since day one.
It would be quite easy to write a small daemon that watches a Gmail inbox and calls the rails action mailbox webhook endpoint with a properly formatted JSON payload.
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.
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,
As part of the whitelisting process for the Gmail Actions, is an unsubscribe link required to be in the email if the audience is internal (only employees)?
We currently use Google Apps (and thus Gmail) for our enterprise mail. We would like to implement the Gmail actions in our issue tracking system's email notifications. The only people that receive these emails are other employees but we need to ensure that 1) people cannot unsubscribe from notifications for themselves and 2) if the notification is sent to a distribution list, not unsubscribe for the entire list.
The unsubscribe link is not required but please describe your use case with the form linked from https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/registering-with-google and note that you are only interested in sending emails internally to your domain.
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!