Hi to any PHPMailer expert.
Being using the mailer and works like a charm!
I have received mails several from various organizations and I get a "View in Browser" option.
I would like to add that same functionality to my mails. I have googled endlessly without success :(
Can anyone point me in the write direction or post the code?
As per usual your help is always appreciated.
Many thanks
Barry
I'm not aware of anything specific to Outlook for doing this, but the normal approach to this (what I do) is to make the same message available as a web page as part of your sending process. On my own system it uses exactly the same mechanism that's used to preview mailings before sending.
So when you have some HTML that you use to generate your email message, do the same thing but render it as a web page directly. If you're using PHPMailer you would do whatever you normally do to build a message and put your content in the Body property and send it, but just output it to the browser instead.
Related
I have read the document and there is a track code should be able to help me.
However, how can i actually use it to get the open rates, url click rates?
For the open rates:
I am using swiftmailer to send the mail, is it a way to add the track code (How? Since mail is plain html , no javascript or php is allowed) What i should do in the html/text mail template?
For the url click rates:
Is it separate from the mailing? that means i just have to add the link in the page i append in the mail. However, are there ways to do it more automatically? For instance, when the mail is sent, i find the url and add the track code for each link one by one?(But how can i create different track code using php?)
That 's lot of question, sorry.I am inexperience in it, Since it takes sometime to answer the question ,any part of the answer is highly appreciated and i will vote up it. Thank you again
The second part of your question:
If you are creating the email with php, you can easily add customized code to the url GET request, like this:
www.yoururl.com/...?yourvar=345
Then you pass the get variable to js (+validation).
Then on the page itself you can add customized event sending to analytics:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'name', value]);
I'm building a newsletter with PHP (Zend) / HTML / CSS, however I've added a "share" button on the newsletter design, I'm wondering if it's possible to somehow integrate it so that whenever someone clicks in this button, the forward outlook functionality would occur.
Is this possible? can someone point me out to the right direction?
You could link to mailto:?subject=<subject>&body=<body>, but it means that the entire content of the subject and body should existing in an url-encoded fashion inside that link. This means that the e-mail will be twice the size. Also, when you embed pictures, those will not exist in the new e-mail, so you will need to link them from the web.
And then, it's still fake. You can't really forward from inside the e-mail, it's just a trick that may not work very well, depending on the client. Especially when the mail is opened in a webmail page. A click on the link will start the offline client, or maybe no client at all, if the user hasn't got one.
Long story short: You can't, you shouldn't.
Trust your user that they know how to find the forward button, or redirect them to a site where they can enter addresses to forward too.
No email client that i know of support this feature in any way. Not even a reply possible. Maybe what makes you think this could be possible is the mailto: anchor handler that only asks the system to start an email edition with the ?subject= and body= query parameter.
But it doesn't allow you to edit or pass in any data to the mail client.
If you are going to be creating an HTML formatted email, you could simply include a mailto: link with a subject and body like so:
<img src="share_button.gif" alt="Share this" />
This would open a new email message in the users client of choice to allow you to send the email along. You could go as far as to include the html of the existing email in the body parameter. Keep in mind that it would need to be escaped html in order to display properly.
A better solution, IMHO, would be to take the user to a page on your site to enter an email address into a form which could then automatically send a copy of the email from your system.
why not just have the server send the email?
http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php
just beware of email injection vulnerabilities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_injection
I need a php script that you can use to set up a online newsletter and then have a link that will allow the visitors to email the Web Page as a Newsletter to someone elses email...
Is this possible? I suppose it is, as it is done here. That is exactly what I need. I want to set up a newsletter, add a script that will allow the visitor to send that newsletter directly to a friends inbox. http://www.pretoria.co.za/interactive/forward-newsletter.html
I suppose I just need the script to send an html file to the email address
Please help - thank you
Use a MySQL and mail function, or use e.g. this.
That can be written fairly easily using one of the email wrapper scripts, such as phpMailer. However, when doing so, pay particular attention to issues that could lead to spam and other abuse of the form. You should spend the time to really lock down the client-side, as well as server-side validation on all input variables.
That being said, the best way is to save the HTML of the page in a database, and pull it out into the body of the email. You should also include a text-only version as an alternate body so people without HTML email will be able to read it. Then, when someone submits the form, just validate the data, put together the message with the methods available with the mailer class you choose, send the email, and then redirect to a "thank you" page.
TFMail was a popular PERL CGI Form Mail script at one time. So far it has served our purposes. It is very easy to set up and configure.
Unfortunately, it only has basic functionality. It works well when you want users to fill in a form and have the result emailed to a specified email address.
Can someone recommend a script ( maybe a PHP script ) that I can use to replace TFMail?
Here's the functionality that I like in TFMail:
Set up an HTML form and point the action at the script
The result of the form gets sent via email
Specify the recipient of the email
Create a template for the email sent to the recipient
Create a emplate for the email sent to the
submitter
Create a template for the
log file
Allow file attachments
Redirect to a thank-you/confirmation page
There are tons. If you use a framework, it will have something, most likely. If not, there is HTML::MIME, Zend_Mail (can be used with or w/o Zend), and many more just a google search away. In the late 90's, it seemed that everyone starting out in something like Perl or PHP would write a mailer as a right-of-passage or something so there are a million of them out there.
http://htmlmimemail.tuxfamily.org/
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/sending-email-zend-mail/
etc...
(Creating our own frameworks is the new right-of-passage, I think.)
i'm new in php. I want to send an email to someone and afterwards i need to check if this mail could be received. How do i do that? Hope you guys understand my problem ;).
Thanks in advance. Marc
That's a really sticky question. The only real way is to have PHP monitor an inbox to check for "undeliverable message" notices you might get back. If you're really wanting to go forward with it, look into POP3 connectors for PHP. Like this: http://pecl.php.net/package/POP3
if (strpos(strtolower($subject), 'undeliverable') !== false){
//do whatever you want with the address that couldn't be reached
}
You technically wouldn't need a compiled PHP extension for POP3 (especially if you're new to PHP)... you could connect and read messages by opening a socket and speaking mail server:
http://www.adamsinfo.com/a-rudimentary-php-pop3-example/
Edit (years later):
Definitely check out http://mailgun.net/, http://sendgrid.com/, and http://postmarkapp.com/.
If you're sending HTML mails, you could use a little trick:
generate a unique id for the mail you are sending (based on content and recipient)
include an image that is loaded from your webserver
<img src="http://yourdomain.com/tracker.php?id=1234567" />
in tracker.php, log the id that called the script and send a 1px by 1px image
This won't work though, if the mail client does not download images from the internet when showing an email, as Thunderbird does, for example (IIRC Outlook does so too)
There is no definite solution for this. Web bugs are a o.k. idea but they're dying out, as they are very problematic security wise and are blocked by default in every current E-mail client I know of. I would suggest a combination of checking a bounce inbox like brianreavis suggested, and in addition, requesting a delivery receipt using the following header line:
Disposition-Notification-To:<xxx.xxx#example.com>
That way, you can get most negatives (bounced mails) as well as many positives (receipts). Sending the receipt can be blocked by the sender, but together with parsing error notifications, you should have fairly reliable system.
One option is a Web Bug but these are far from 100% reliable, and are arguably not a nice way to behave. It won't differentiate between emails which are unread and those which are undelivered, for example because of a bad email address, and it is possible to read an email containing a Web Bug without triggering it.
In short you create an HTML email containing an element which has a URL on your site which is unique to that email. So if a client accesses that URL you can be sure that someone has read your email. Wikipedia gives this example:
For example, an e-mail sent to the address somebody#example.org can contain the embedded image of URL http://example.com/bug.gif?somebody#example.org. Whenever the user reads the e-mail, the image at this URL is requested. The part of the URL after the question mark is ignored by the server for the purpose of determining which file to send, but the complete URL is stored in the server's log file. As a result, the file bug.gif is sent and shown in the e-mail reader; at the same time, the server stores the fact that the particular e-mail sent to somebody#example.org has been read.
However, it is possible - probably quite likely - that someone can read your email without connecting to that URL. This may because:
A lot of email readers block such links by default because of privacy concerns precisely because of Web Bugs like this.
They read the email in text only, either because their email client is configured to do so or because it can't display HTML email, for example, a lot of mobile phone clients.
This is a often used option - both by spammers and more responsible marketers - but I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you fully understand its limitations and implications in terms of what people might think of you if you do use it.
There is a perfect solution, in terms of knowing the eMail has been read.
The bad part is that the body of the eMail must be stored on web server.
The trick:
-Send an eMail just just a small text and a URL, so the user must go to that URL to read de content of the eMail.
In other words... on the eMail there is nothing about what you want to send, there is only a link to a unique page you create before sending such eMail.
So to read the content the user must open a web browser and go to such URL.
The trick is to put a little of such text on eMail... something like: bla, bla, bla ... press here to read more.
The concept: Online body, offline URL to access such body.
That way you can be sure of this: if URL has been read, the eMail has been read.
The bad part is that the info you want to send is not on the eMail, must be on a unique webpage.
So you must control no robot can go to such URL... for example with URL like:
https://server/private/?eMail_Body=user
Hope this idea can help someone.