I have a rails app that just launched and I have over a thousand users signed up to the site. We are interested in keeping in contact with the community through email newsletters. We have been using a third party tool and migrating the email addresses from one database to another. Is there an easier way to do this from rails? I am open to suggestions.
http://github.com/adzap/ar_mailer
ar_mailer will allow you to queue up mail and send it out over time so you don't violate any mail rules put in place by your host.
If you really, absolutely, definitely need to send to these emails yourself, and you're dealing with a larger user base, you'd probably want to go through a distributed setup employing something like Starling, RabbitMQ, or the all-new Resque to distribute the task of sending these emails across a multitude of workers.
It's a topic far from trivial, so all in all I'd recommend using an external service provider for this.
Use ActionMailer to generate emails from templates (views) using Erb. I would do this unless you wish track clickthroughs back to your site from those mails, then you may be better of using a third party.
As an aside (I'm sure you know this but), be aware that you'll need to inform your ISP and demonstrate to them that you have permission from your users to send these emails, else they may block you from sending without warning.
You can simply loop through all the emails and send individual emails. It's pretty simple using rails and there are tutorials everywhere.
You could also use the third party API to add automatically your users emails to their database. If you could provide the third party you're using, I could maybe give you more information.
Some newsletter website give you the option to add emails directly in their system via a given form. Why not use this form? You would put it somewhere on the website and the system will add the new emails to the third party software and not to yours. Of course this only works if you have a "enter your email here to subscribe" kind of logic.
Related
I'm developing a Mac app that uses CloudKit as its back-end. Some of my users are requesting the ability to ingest and extract data via an automation/integration service such as Zapier. For this, I need to introduce a web API.
I am planning to use CloudKit Web Services to access the app's data. This data is user-specific and hence, resides in a private database. As a result, CloudKit requires user authentication as described here.
Essentially the user needs to be redirected to an Apple-hosted authentication page. After successful authentication, an authentication token is provided that can be used for data operations. Similar to how OAuth2 works, but different enough to not work with Zapier's (or probably any other similar services) supported authentication schemes.
Who has done something similar? What are my options? I want to keep things as simple as possible and make my web API's implementation as thin as possible.
Thanks.
Niels
This is definitely doable and you are on-track with your thinking. Here's how I envision it working:
You could do all of this with a front-end web app (no server-side app needed). I personally prefer Vue.js but you probably have something in mind already.
Your app will need to authenticate the user to CloudKit using the flow you mentioned. I highly recommend you use the Web Services API and not try to wrestle Apple's neglected CloudKit JS API. For this, you are going to need to generate an API token in the CloudKit Dashboard.
You app would then prompt the user to authenticate to Zapier.
You should now have user credentials for both CloudKit and Zapier in place in the user's browser cache (you can save, for example, the CloudKit token to sessionStorage and likewise with Zapier).
Make API calls to Zapier, pull down the data, and then save it to CloudKit all within your JS app. It's all API transactions at this point. I'm a fan of Axios for making the HTTP requests.
If you are downloading files, transacting huge amounts of data, or doing processor-intensive stuff, you might consider using a server for that work. But if you just need a place to pull and push reasonable chunks of data, I see no reason why you can't do it all in a front-end app.
Alternatively, if you don't want a web app at all, and want to only have the user work in the Mac app, that can be done, too. Just make API calls directly to Zapier from within your Cocoa app. Whether or not this is feasible depends some on how you want it to work.
If you have more specific questions or need help with any of the implementation details, feel free to add a follow-up comment or ask a new question.
Good luck!
I think the other answer is mostly correct. I don't know much about CloudKit, but we can talk through what you'd need for it to work.
Let's say you had a simple iOS app that stored contacts. On the iOS side, Apple presumably abstracts the upload and download operations.
If you wanted to make a web viewer for synced contacts using CloudKit, you'd need an endpoint to fetch all rows belonging to the authenticated user (each of which would have a UUID, name, and a phone number). I believe that's possible with CloudKit code Apple provides (but let me know if I'm off base).
Now, we want to integrate with Zapier. Say, a "New Contact" trigger. You make some sort of authenticated HTTP request from Zapier to Apple on behalf of an authenticated user. It gives back a list of contacts and Zapier can trigger on the ones it hasn't seen before. To do that, Zapier needs some sort of user token.
That's where the little front-end page the other answerer mentioned comes into play. If you've got a web page that can surface a user's token to them, they can paste it into Zapier and all of the above becomes possible. I'm not sure what the lifespan of the token is, but hopefully it can be automatically refreshed as needed (rather than the user needing to take any manual action).
I'm not sure if what I've described is possible, but do let me know if it is. It would be huge if it were possible to integrate Zapier and the iOS ecosystem!
Edit to respond to comments:
Zapier won't be able to interact with CloudKit in a way sufficient for me (some minor business logic is needed)
I'm not sure what that entails for you, but it's common to put logic in the Zapier integration to structure data in a way Zapier expects. There's a full Node.js execution environment, so the sky's the limit here.
I don't think Zapier can authenticate against CloudKit as it uses a non-standard authentication scheme
Once you've got a user's token (described above, which is unusual), you will almost certainly be able to use it in requests to cloudkit. Zapier provides a "custom" authentication scheme which lets you do basically anything you want. So unless Apple uses something that fetch can't handle (unlikely), it should be fine (once you get the token).
I would like to push data directly from my app into Zapier and have it done whatever magic the user has configured
This is also probably possible. Zapier ingests data in two ways:
polling, where Zapier frequently makes a web request, store the IDs of items we've seen before, and act on the new ones. You can read more about that here. Assuming you can work your business logic into the integration, this is doesn't require an external server besides Apple's
webhooks, where Zapier registers a subscription with you and you send new data, on demand, to that address. This would probably require a webserver on your end to handle. It's optional though - you can do polling instead.
Hopefully this cleared it up a bit. Feel free to reach out to partners#zapier.com and reference this question to talk more about it.
I'm creating an e-mail client for iOS and before the start of working on it, I want to select the best architecture for it.
For example, at the first stage, I want to connect Gmail. I searched and found that Google has a ready library for doing that, so I can just connect the library and fetch my emails.
Another way of doing that is fetching emails from the API in my web server and later to take these emails from my server.
The main purpose is not just to fetch emails, but to be able later to add some new filtrations to it or some other functionalities, maybe machine learning technologies for better personalisation, etc.
Also, I want to support multiple email servers(Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.)
What do you advise me to choose, to fetch from my own server or directly from the email servers? I also understand the security issues in the case of using my own servers.
Your feedbacks will help me a lot! Thanks in advance!
You shouldn't use your own server for this task. You just don't need it. It's less secure and I'm pretty sure, that some of your clients will dislike the fact, that you can store their mails on your own server.
If you want to support multiple email server providers, then you should use IMAP protocol for receiving mails and SMTP for sending. Also, in some cases, you can use OAuth2 as authentication method, so you don't need to ask user to enter his credentials in your application.
I recommend you to use some open source libraries for working with IMAP and SMTP, because implementing this protocols by self can be complicated.
Sounds very similar to what I was doing. I was recently building PickedMail where the backend is heavy AI. For Google, you'll want to use Oauth2 and use the server_token to pass in to your server.
I created an iOS framework for this, hope that helps you. https://github.com/Thywis/MultiAccountOauth
For others like outlook, yahoo, iCloud, I'd suggest using IMAP for now.
I a thinking of creating an iPhone/iOS app that would include a feature where one user could create a list of words and then save them to their account on a server. Also (and this is very important), the user could share their list with other users by giving them permission.
So my question is, how can I go about creating such a server? For right now, I have a home computer (running Windows XP that just stores data for my music system) which I can use to host the server. I am also open to the use of other online storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox (I can't remember if Amazon does anything like that). However (and I know this may complicate things a bit), but at least for now, I want/need to stick with free services/options.
Just to recap, the key features that I am looking for are:
create users/accounts (on the server)
eventually I may [try] to incorporate the use of other services to log users in like with their email account, OpenId, etc.
the ability to access (log in to) the server (with credentials) from my app
the ability to send/receive data between the server and my app
the ability to share data between users
I know this is a lot to ask for, but if anyone has any suggestions or can get me going in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.
The basic setup would be as follows:
Backend: Database (MySQL), Web server (Apache), with server side scripting (PHP).
Client: iOS device with developed app.
Communication: use HTTP client/server model, communicating with something like JSON.
This is much the same setup as a web server, but instead of serving html/css/javascript etc the results will be JSON.
As far as implementing specifics such as login in, and sharing data between users, this is purely dependent on your implementation. This is not trivial, and not something that can be easily stated in a single post.
Hope this helps.
You could build your own webservice in PHP, Ruby or Python. If you do so I would recommend building a RESTful webservice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) and then use RestKit (http://restkit.org/) to handle the data in the iOS app. Especially RestKit's CoreData integration is nice in my opinion.
Another solution would be using a service like Parse (https://parse.com/products/data). The first million or so requests per month are free but after that it could get pricy. I personally have not tried it so I couldn't tell you if it is any good.
A client needs to send out eNewsletters.
We tried using their Sitefinity CMS, but it hangs for reasons that are hard to determine.
As a result, I am inclined to "roll my own".
However, various pitfalls yawn deep and dark along the imagined path.
For example:
Imagined Pitfalls
My client's domain gets blacklisted.
The emails get rejected as Spam.
Presumed ways of avoiding imagined pitfalls:
a. Send out emails with a delay of, say, 2 seconds between each one.
b. Send out emails individually, ie, no CC or BB.
Questions:
Are my imagined pitfalls and presumed
ways of avoiding them correct?
Can you think of other pitfalls?
Or better ways of avoiding them?
Do you know of reliable software that
just does this (ASP.NET, MVC by
preference, drawing form SQL Server
db).
It may be beneficial to use a third party like Constant Contact to handle sending your email campaigns. They expose an API that you can tap into via REST and it won't have any effect on your client's domain. Constant Contact is a reputable company and email campaigns they send out rarely get caught in Spam filters. My company currently uses the service, but not the API and its been very successful.
Constant Contact's Website
CC's API Web Site
Example of creating a Campaign
You should never do this. Your client's IP(s) and domain(s) will find themselves blacklisted to the point that even their legitimate, hand-crafted emails won't make it past spam filters at large mail services.
Use something like SendGrid if you want to stay closer to the metal than a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact.
There are other companies out there which do it, such as BriefYourMarket ... never roll your own :-)
I have a ruby / rails application that integrates in and outgoing email directly into the app. The app is going to be running on multiple domains each with posible many users sending and recieving email.
I have looked into sendgrid, mailchimp and mad mimi as hosted services and also looked to create my own email server.
There are advantages and disadvantages of both solutions and i am not sure which one to go down and am hoping someone can give me advice ??
Any help will be great. I know email is a hassle to manage but once set up correctly cant be that bad ??
Thanks in advance
Rick
Hosting your own Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) has some benefits with easier mailbox creation and less latency but it requires significantly more maintenance. There's also the problem with spam filtering that would require some constant tweaking. An outside firm will likely have a more advanced filtering system in place that you can leverage the larger quantity of traffic passing through it.
Never underestimate the increased effort for uptime as more components are integrated.
I'd use Heroku, the have some mail add-ons