I am building an application using Ruby on Rails. I want to do something that I am not even sure is possible;
I have a mailer that is working, however I want to enable users to send emails using their own email address in the FROM parameter. Its almost as if the ":from" parameter has no effect on the email sent.
I'm a bit of a noob when dealing with email servers so please be as detailed as possible. I doubt there is a smtp mail server set up on my hosting account, so if I need to do something like install smtp on my hosting account please be as descriptive as possible.
You are able to set the From: field to whatever you want, theoretically, but in practice you are often limited as to what you can put in there. Many email providers will automatically replace the From address with your own regardless so that you can't masquerade as someone else.
You're probably intending to do something like this:
From: Example Customer Name <name#example.com>
Also keep in mind that sending email from arbitrary domains will result in a very high chance of being flagged as spam since you are most likely not listed as as a host authorized to send for those domains which is typically implemented with SPF.
The best practice is to set the address to be something like this:
From: Example Customer Name <you#yourdomain.name>
That way you're not spoofing your actual email address, only the associated label, which is not typically verified.
Related
One issue I'm seeing with Devise is that confirmation emails can go to the spam folder. If the user could simply respond to the email, that would serve to confirm the email address and it would train gmail that the sender is not spam.
Any recommendation on if this is worth doing and how would I do it?
Or maybe there's a much easier way to avoid having sent application mails go to spam?
I've been having the exact same issue, and after a long night I believe I have it sorted out.
1) Make sure you have an SPF record set up for your domain.
2) Set up DKIM on your mail server and put your public key in your DNS (TXT record).
3) Make sure your html email is properly formatted ( I had to add the html opening and closing tags to mine, Devise did not do this by default).
4) The last piece of the puzzle was making sure I was sending both plaintext and html MIME parts in my emails. Just creating an additional plaintext 'text.erb' file for each of my mail views seemed to do the trick (Rails auto-magically picked it up and constructed multipart emails for me).
You can verify 1 and 2 are setup right by viewing the 'original' email within Gmail and making sure you see something like "spf=pass" and "dkim=pass" in the headers.
A friend informed me about a service called SendGrid (and I'm sure there are other service providers that do exactly the same thing) after I had spent nearly an entire night going from WTH is DKIM? -- to getting way more familiar with SMTP, DNS, and postfix than I ever wanted to be. But it works now, and I'm probably too cheap to pay for a third party service anyway :)
This is not Devise's fault. Devise actually follows the best practices concerning confirmation of email address.
I believe you fall in the category of bulk email senders, and that you will have to follow quite a few guidelines to sort this out.
I would advise you to go through Google help pages for more information on how to fix this:
Configuration help: https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81126
Help wizard: https://support.google.com/mail/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=2696779&page=ts.cs
I'm fairly new to Ruby on Rails and actually entirely new to website mailing. In a lot of example tutorials I see a "from" object assigned to, for example, "new#example.com". When I setup the emailing functionality on a localhost the RoR command prompt says that everything finished fine even when I keep "new#example.com" as the from object. Can I actually mail from a localhost port? What would I have to put as my "from" address in order to actually send mail from the my local web application? Just a regular email I have? How would it be authenticated to ensure that the "from" address is actually the real address?
It seems a really fundamental concept and I understand all the model/view/controller actions that have to be done to make it work but I'm confused I guess as to how it actually works
In general the from field can be anything.
Some mail servers may take action if they think that you are claiming to be someone you are not, such as blocking mail or marking it as spam (via mechanisms such as DKIM or SPF). These are done at the domain level, ie the mail server tries to work out whether the server talking to it is allowed to send email claiming to be from #example.com.
Other mail servers mail just silently rewrite your from field if they know who you are, for example if you are talking to the gmail smtp servers and have authenticated as bob then the from field will be set to bob#gmail.com, unless it is already set to an email address gmail knows you own.
By default, in development rails doesn't try and send email at all. For it to send email you need to configure the deluvery_method, usually this involves either setting it to :sendmail (if you have an appropriately configured instance of sendmail running locally) or setting to :smtp and also providing details of an smtp server to use.
I need to check email accounts whether exists or not, I need to do that using Delphi and Indy (if possible)
I have a windows database for ERP system and I need to make sure that the customer enter valid email into the system so I can send to my customer the quotes they request.
I tried to test on yahoo and google using send commands HELO, MAIL and RCPT but no success.
Mail servers have to protect themselves against spammers and others with malicious intent. They are not going to give up their secrets easily. It is common for mail servers to be configured to black hole messages sent to non-existent recipients. They don't respond to the sender saying, "sorry, that user doesn't exist, please try again."
So, if you want to verify whether or not an e-mail address has a human behind it I think the only way to be sure is to send an e-mail requesting a response.
You have to ask your customers to confirm their email address, i.e. entering it twice to reduce misspellings, asking to register and sending an activation link and so on. State explicitly they need a valid email address: if they're asking you a quote why should they enter an invalid address? But be aware some people may use disposable email addresses to protect their real ones.
You have no way to check if an address really exists just asking its server. Due to the large amount of spam and techniques implemented by spammer to harvest and clean their addresses lists, most servers are setup to defend themselves.
That's why I suggested to "be polite". I am sorry if you got it the wrong way, I was just telling you that if your application shows a "spammer-like" behaviour (and your previous version of the question was much unclearer about your aims), it can lead to your IPs being blacklisted. Then you can have much more troubles to send quotes to customers.
You may try ICS components, an open source library with good examples (see SMTPClient).
So this library or another one will not tell you if an email account exists or not because it's depending on the way the host answer to the commands about a non existent account.
In ICS, when the command have been sent you may have to manage an event : SmtpRequestDone(Sender: TObject; RqType: TSmtpRequest;ErrorCode: Word);
Where ErrorCode is the Error code (ie 550).
I have a rails app and I am using ActionMailer to send email but now I need to know if the email is delivered or what?
Do anyone has an idea of how to handle sent emails status(e.g bounced, delivered) ?
thanks.
Email service providers use a technique called variable envelope return path. The idea is to encode a unique key for each message into the (envelope) return address so that when a destination smtp server returns email as a bounce you can tie it to the originating message.
If it sounds complex, it is. It gets harder if you want to track response rates, which links were clicked, opens, use Domain Keys, etc. Note that it requires you to set up or configure an SMTP server for handling returned mail.
There are a number of services that provide this all to you on a Software As Service basis. We use socketlabs and are very happy with them. Industrial strength and all. I've also heard of people using Postmark in the Ruby community.
I'm considering adding email addresses to a marketing web app. Currently users are able to sign up and get a subdomain address that they can choose (theychoose.domain.com). So I'm thinking of also offering theychoose#domain.com for an email address they can use.
I've pretty much decided on sendgrid.com for sending email through the web interface which takes care of a ton of sending headaches. I'd also like to avoid setting up an email server if I could so I'm looking for services that allow me to set up an account and then programmatically create addresses when a user signs up. I want to find a service that will deal with all the spam filtering etc.
Also, this probably makes no difference but it's a Rails app.
One possibility is to use Google Apps Premier Edition. The API description can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/apps/gdata_provisioning_api_v2.0_reference.html.
Keep in mind though, that each user will cost $50/year. However, if you make significantly more than that per registered user, then it may be worth it.