We are currently using Mandrill to send emails. We use mandrill quite a few different systems to send emails.
Is there any API way to get the content of a sent email? I Know mandrill stores a copy for up to 30 days.
At this time, there's not an API for the email contents. If you're using templates, you can use the templates/render API call to get the rendered HTML of a template with merge tags and the like, but it isn't the actual content of a sent email.
You can use the messages.content method, you just need the API key and the message ID (which is returned in the send call).
Bear in mind that Mandrill only saves the content for 24h by default, and it can be extended up to 30 days by paying. So make sure you make the messages.content call within that time frame.
Also, other people have had trouble when calling messages.content too soon, as it appears that the content takes a bit to be indexed (see answer in this post)
Related
My intranet web application (written in C#/ASP.Net MVC) sends email notifications in certain situations. I would like to intercept replies to such emails and perform actions based on the content of such replies.
I have no preference for scripting language - it could be Powershell, Python, VBA, anything - as long as I can parse the subject and body of the email, I can then alter the database of my web application through this script and pick up changes with an automated task, but I really have no clue where to start. I would be really grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.
QUESTION
How can I intercept emails sent to the Outlook server and perform action based on the content of such emails?
It sounds like you need an inbound email parsing service. I've worked with the one from SendGrid and it will catch any replies to a specific email address, and then post the email contents to an action on a controller in your MVC app. This will give you access to the full email contents and you can process it as needed.
See Setting up Inbound Parse
I need to send to the customers a raw emails via my rails app.
When they click a link, a new page must open and they need to be able to see the source code of an email. I have a lot of cases where there are emails really big (even 40/50 mb), and it takes a lot of time to server to send it.
E.G.
I have an email with 3 attachments, the total size is 30mb. My
controller method it takes 700 ms to process it and to retrieve the
raw source from imap server, but in the broswer, it takes up to 5
seconds. (2.5 to the first byte, 2.5 to download it).
Right now I just send the string with the render method. Is there a better way? where I am losing all that time?
To be more clear:
With the word 'send' I mean when the server has to 'send' the source code to the browser so the suer can visualize it
What about storing attachments on your server and include in email only links to those attachments? This way your emails will be blazingly fast and clients may download attachments separately. If you don't want to store files on your server, you may use Amazon S3 or some other cloud storage (there are many in these days).
To ease file uploading, I'd recommend you carrierwave library, Amazon S3 integration goes from the box.
I would suggest you to use Delayed Job: https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job or Sidkiq: https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
When the job is in processing state, you can mark that email as Sending.... and once the background job is completed you can mark it as Sent
Hope this helps
I think you could benefit from looking into solutions for HTTP streaming, which would allow you to start sending data while still processing the request.
This is difficult with Rack based servers, so Rails might have some issues with this approach.
Another approach is to try and split the raw source into chunks and request each chunk using Ajax.
This will allow your app to be more responsive and offer a better user experience. This is also known as a perceived performance approach, since the user experiences the app as more responsive even if it takes the same amount of time to load.
If I were trying to resolve the issue, I would look into an Ajax solution that would allow me to leverage IMAP's partial fetch feature, referenced in it's RFC.
It's possible to write a simple server side API that fetches a part of an email or returns a signal when there is no more to download and than use Javascript to request the data from the server until the 'no more data' return value is received.
This would allow you to display the downloaded data as it's being received.
With my rails application, I'm supposed to provide following features:
There a limited number of users interacting with my system (in order of 10 to 20)
Like any normal mail client users should be able to have an inbox page showing received message, response to individual email and etc....
The mail client part cannot be an external application, they want everything packaged into a single application!
Normally These emails should be stored for future use
In order to send a receive email, we do not need to setup a mail server. They will provide the server and we will fetch the message with POP3 or something else. Same goes for sending emails.
The application itself often needs to look into these message as well, so it should be able to access corresponding email objects.
Separate part of these applications can be handled with individual gems such as Mailman, ActionMailer, and etc...
But what would be your suggestions to get this done?
I suggestion customizing an open source solution according to your needs. This is a gem/project that you should look at https://github.com/mailboxer/mailboxer It has all the features that you mentioned and its straightforward in its customizations.
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'm currently creating an email app that is able to send emails to many users. However, I want to know whether there are bounced emails. I'm currently using Amazon SES to notify me if the email is bounced. However, I want the bounced email's data to be automatically entered into my Rails application instead of typing it manually based to the mailer daemons I get from Amazon. Is there are way to do so?
If you are willing to pay, this SaaS site called bouncely seems to provide an interface and an api wrapper around SES bounces.
send_email() returns a response object which can be interrogated for the response metadata.
Compare the status of this with the code you are interested in, perhaps a 550.
I couldn't find any clean existing solution for this, so I wrote a gem (email_events) that allows you to put a email event handler method (including for bounce events) right in your mailer class: https://github.com/85x14/email_events. It supports SES and Sendgrid, so should work for you if you still need it.