Gmail action buttons *inside* emails? - google-schemas

Gmail actions seem like a really cool feature, but their placement at the far right of the subject line means I invariably miss them, even when I know they exist (i.e. for a MailChimp confirmation email).
It would make a lot more sense to me to place these buttons inside the email, as part of the regular content. Is this supported by the current API? Or are there any plans to support it in the future?

There are plans to show more interactive cards like the ones currently used for flight reservations, but for the moment actions will only be shown on the subject line.
There are no plans for the API to add buttons inside the email as part of the content, as the content is HTML defined by the sender and HTML already supports buttons.

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Any idea to archive emails in Conversations in Asana?

I would like to centralize every email from (or to) customers of a project in the Conversations view of a project in Asana. The goal is to keep an archive of all exchanges with a customer in one place for every team member.
I tried to use the project#mail.asana.com as CC in every emails that i send but customers don't have accounts on Asana (and i don't want them to access it) and so they can't save their replies in Conversations. I tried also to create an email group (in Google Apps) and add the Asana email at it but it didn't work.
Any idea to use the Conversations view as an archive ? Or maybe is there an external tool which integrate with Asana that can do this ?
Thanks a lot in advance !
Hmm, that's interesting! I suppose that if you don't have too many emails this makes some sense (otherwise it might make your Asana Inbox pretty noisy - everyone would see in their inbox every conversation)
I think what I would do is to set up a Gmail filter to automatically forward the email to your team. You can do this in Gmail like this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en. If you set up a good filter (i.e. sent to a group address) it seems like it would be pretty painless.
One thing to note is that the conversation in Asana will appear to come from whoever is associated with the email that's sending the conversation to Asana, so if you have a single POC with the outside world, it may make sense to only forward from their account. Alternatively, you could set up a special Asana user just for this purpose, and your teammates can follow a convention that "mailbot" (or whatever user it is) is just used to forward mail, and you should look at the content to get who the author was.

Link in email to process an ics invitation

I have implemented an invitation system in my application, that generates an ical attachment that is sent to the appropriate users.
Is it possible to add a link in the email body that would trigger the processing of the invitation ? (in addition to the extra buttons provided by some email clients)
This question mentions that for email attachments in the general case it's not possible. Is it still the case for icalendar attachments ?
Other questions suggest using a service like https://www.addevent.com/, but this seems to be more oriented toward "public events", whereas in my case I would need something quite private (only invitations between 2 people), that are expected to be generates quite often (should be able to scale up to 100/day without problem), or it it just me getting a bad impression ?
Dealt with this problem several years ago and there was no way you could force most email client to "process" (trigger "Add to calendar" menu).
However, what you want is just make some element in your email trigger that. You can do this by simply linking that element to .ical file on your server. The advantage is that you can attache some parameters to your link and generate that event file dynamically. Also, it scales pretty well.

Mandrill - detect forwarded emails?

Is there a way to detect if an email sent via Mandrill has been forwarded by the recipient to someone else?
The email will contain links (click tracking can be on). I'm wondering if somehow if the recipient of the forwarded email clicks any of the links that it could be used as an indicator that the email was forwarded.
Or perhaps some other approach?
There is not a way.
Unless that same message you sent gets forwarded from recipient 1 --> recipient 2 --> back to you (you would check headers), there is not a way. In order for this to even be an option, whoever your recipient uses as an email server/client, would have to be built with this functionality.
- Below is merely added to show a very limited potential to track emails being forwarded.
You could potentially reference an embedded image on the internet (something you can track), AND* if the "forwarded recipient" allows images to be viewed, you MAY* be able to see the IP's that have accessed your image you referenced in the email.
AND* = Image viewing is rarely ever enabled. User has to allow this to happen on a per-email basis.
MAY* = Now you run into the hassle of trying to understand your recipients network and if many people share public IP's (think home networks or small businesses, cheaper for internet provide to assign one IP to house/building)
You would THEN have to go into the hassle of tracking down an IP to a person.
As i know it is not posible to track normal forwarded e-mails. I mean mails that are forwarded with the "forward" button of the mail client.
I've seen some times an "Click here to forward" button in news letters. When you click on that button you go to an web page where you can put the mail address of the recipient. When you click on the send button an exact coppy of the newsletter is send to the mail addres which is typed in the textbox. With this method you can track the forwards.
The problem is that not everyone uses this method (so uses the default forward button). To trigger people to use your button you can give them something special (discount or credits where they can get something with). A second thing is that you need to put the button on the top of your mail for the best result.
If it is posible with Mandrill i cant tell you but i read in this topic the Mandrill support is good so maybe you can mail them. You need to do an fund first so you can get use the support but they can tell you if it is posible and how.
Link to Mandrill support page
Though I haven't used it, I believe it is possible with Merge Tags. Refer the below
The MailChimp *|FORWARD|* merge tag generates a link to an online form where recipients can share your email with others. Because Mandrill emails are generated and tracked individually, a web version isn't provided automatically.
More details can be found here

How can I create an email using a specific font?

I have made an applications which has specific font (handwriting.ttf), it works absolutely fine in application but when I email the text written in this font through my application - the font becomes gibrish on receivers end (the reason is that receiver does not have this perticular font in his computer)
I have seen another application that sends text via email using custom font.
This gives me confidence that functionality like this works - but I dont kow how?
When you say gibberish, do you mean that the user is seeing the copy, but with the alignment and other graphical elements getting screwed up, or that you literally see something entirely incomprehensible. I would have expected your font tag to have a series of fonts and that the email would have fallen back to one of the more standard fonts if the attempt to use the custom font failed. Please update your original question with (a) the code that you're using to create your email body, as well as (b) a screen snapshot of how it's rendered in the email client.
Two immediate suggestions:
If you know of other apps that are sending email with a custom font (which I'm surprised by, but I'll take your word for it), have one of them send you an email and then view the source of that email and see what it's putting in the email's html and examine how it's doing it;
Most emails I get that are employing specialized fonts are also incorporating all sorts of graphical elements and it's sending the email as an image (which you can either embed in-line in the html-based email using base64, or put on some server and link to the <img> there), frequently with a text rendition, too. You can use Quartz 2D to create those images that you then embed in your email. Clearly this won't work in all situations, but using images for the body of the email, or PDFs (which you can also generate from the app) for attachments seems to be more common.
Personally, I'd shy away from embedding custom fonts in the html body of the email because you're subject to the vagaries of how the user's email client renders custom fonts, if at all. Plus you'd want to do some exhaustive testing, examining the email in different email clients (as #meccan's commented link had done). If the look and feel of the resulting email are critical and highly stylized, and if the content of the email is relatively short, I'd lean towards option 2.

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.

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