I'm currently trying to design a PHP webapp that allows users to send emails to other users. The recipient can then reply to the email and the message will be updated in the webapp.
Now to keep track of each individual user message, I would like to add a custom header (ie. conversation_id) in the email. When the recipient replies to the email in their email client, will the custom mail header (ie. conversation_id) be preserved?
There will be cron job that executes every minute that opens a POP3 stream to the web server to retrieve new emails (replies that the user may have sent with their mail client) to update my DB.
I'm not sure if this is a good way for designing such an app. Any suggestions?
EDIT: Also, I'm sure wondering how I can strip out the quoted messages in the reply?
You can't rely on mail headers being preserved - it is pretty much up to the individual mail client to decide what to include.
I would generally put the conversation ID within [] brackets in the subject which makes it really easy to parse out with a regular expression.
Each message already contains the Message-ID field which is used by the mail clients to create the content of the In-Reply-To field.
Wouldn't the usual way after the standards be to rely on the user's mail client setting the in-reply-to field correctly? As far as I know, all email client use this correctly. (even though according to this thread Outlook may have an occasional bug?)
So I think, emails already feature this and you don't have to worry about creating a custom mail header entry and unpredictably behaving mail clients.
EDIT: I rembember a friend telling me his frustration from work about how many people remove or even edit these Tags in [ ] brackets from the suject field. Also, it seems to be a very dirty work-around and all of your software would need to handle it without opposing it to the users ability to change it => practically impossible.
EDIT: I think it will be hard to reliably strip out the quoted message in the reply, because each mail client handles it differently.
Related
So our system is sending us email notifications regarding specific incidents. The problem is, things get really spammy and disorganized, and we really want to have our email client (Gmail) thread notifications regarding the same incident.
So for instance:
Email 1 is sent about incident 1.
Email 2 is sent about incident 1.
Gmail displays them in their own threads while we want them to appear as "replies" in the same thread.
I thought all I needed was to append "Re: Subject Line" but that doesn't work. Then I read about the References and In-Reply-To headers, but these require storing message IDs and we'd want to avoid the overhead if we can.
Is there any workaround to have clients thread emails received about the same topic without having to store message IDs and add them to In-Reply-To headers?
Thank you so much!
Note: Using PHPMailer
You really can't get around this. You must have something that uniquely identifies a message, and as far as email messages go, that something is the message ID, and that's also exactly the thing referenced by References and In-Reply-To headers, so you really can't get away from that. It has to be implemented using message headers because that's universally supported by all email clients.
The definitive threading algorithm, is, like email itself, now very old, but you can find it here, and it's still as valid as it ever was. I used that approach to implement the email threading used in the chamsocial.com social network.
Some email clients try to do threading without using message IDs, and it's almost always a failure - I sometimes see Apple Mail doing this when IDs are missing, pulling completely unrelated messages into a thread just because they happen to have the same subject.
If you wanted to do message threading without message IDs, you'd need to think up something that acts in exactly the same way - which is pointless, so you're best off biting the bullet and implementing message ID support properly.
I'm using Laravel 5.5. In my app, users can write something and send it through email to someone. The thing they wrote gets recorded as a "message" in my DB. I need to, somehow, send the ID of this message in the e-mail, so when the receiver replies through e-mail, I know which message he's replying to.
What's the easiest way to do this? I know there are APIS, but I need to implement a custom solution.
Thanks for any light on this.
Use extended addressing on your mail server - replies+specialcode#example.com ... although a lot of bad "email validation" methods think it isn't valid, so I changed the extension character to a hyphen instead of the + on my postfix setup.
All mail is delivered to replies#example.com but the to: and other headers keep the specialcode part which you can then use to route into a ticketing system, etc.
This feature is supported by Postfix (recipient_delimiter in main.cf), QMail, and several other SMTP servers. Note that you need the support for this on the incoming-to-you SMTP side, nowhere else, especially if you use a character that isn't typically declared as "wrong" by various filters. May be worth splitting off a subdomain so you can easily set up separate MX servers, etc. since I'm sure you don't want your regular corporate mail running through the same filters and processing (at least, I would...)
I'm confused about how mail works in PHP and CakePHP.
1.) What is the difference between sending an email either using the PHP mail function / CakePHP email helper or SMPTP as shown here: http://book.cakephp.org/1.3/en/view/1290/Sending-A-Message-Using-SMTP as the outcome looks the same?
2.) To specify who the email is coming from, you pass in the email in the header, but you can put whatever you want, so what is stopping you from just putting in anything? like yourbank.com? mail('you#gmail.com', "Subject", "Message", "From: <dave#yourbank.com>"); I just tried it and it worked fine and I couldn't find out anyway in Gmail to see if it didn't come from dave at yourbank.com...
Hopefully I can get some light on these two questions. Thanks.
1). CakePHP has a bunch of helpers & functionality implemented to make life easier when developing applications. As you've discovered, Cake has mail functionality. I suggest reading this whole page http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/email.html (It's 2.0 not 1.3, so please not there have been some big alterations between the two versions). The article covers in depth on why you may configure something in a particular manner.
CakePHP is using the default mail function with PHP. It's just allow you to incorporate views into the content and configure the outgoing mail in a much easier manner.
2) As for putting in potentially any email address within the From Header.... this can potentially fall under the category of Email Spoofing, essentially sending an email when it's not authorized from the source (From Header). Again this links back to configuring specific mail servers.
By default mail clients and generally setup to prevent spam and junk, this is done by taking a large amount of steps. Some may be..
Keyword checking, (Checking the contents of an email for any
keywords classified as spam).
Header checking, <--- This is the one that answers your
question.
Essentially... headers are examined and checked to see if the server that the mail was sent from has the authority to use the given from address.
As I don't have enough technical knowledge, i'll throw a few pages your way which discuss setting up records against your DNS/Domain so emails are validated correctly and not put within spam folders.
http://www.ipswitch.com/support/imail/guide/imailgsv8.1/Appendix%20A%20dns4.html
http://help.postageapp.com/kb/application-features/dkim-and-spf-setup-and-validation
How to properly set up DNS SPF records?
I hope my jumbled ramblings make some sort of sense.
Question 1: PHP mail function uses your own server's built in email functionality to send email. If you use SMTP, you're connecting to another server (eg. Google's mail servers) and using that server to send the email.
CakePHP's email component can use either PHP mail, or SMTP, depending on how you configure it.
The outcome is basically the same in many respects. Which way is best for you will depend on your set up, the volume of email you're sending, whether your own server has any restrictions with regards to sending mail, etc. If you Google "PHP mail versus SMTP" or similar, then you'll get some info to help you decide which is best for you.
If you're not sending much email, eg. if you're just wanting to send the results of an enquiry form that gets submitted a few times each day, then just use PHP mail and don't worry about it.
Question 2: Although email programs put various measures in place to make sure mail is legitimate, basically nothing stops fake emails completely. You can send Fake email. Check out this site: http://deadfake.com/Send.aspx and in particular, their FAQ section: http://deadfake.com/FAQ.aspx
Spam filters do their best to catch fake emails, but ultimately it's up to the end user to keep their wits about them, especially with banking emails!
We're parsing an email inbox signed up to a mailing list (Mailman) that does nothing except sit there and capture emails from other users on the mailing list. This is going to be PHP connecting to an email box, grabbing new emails and putting them into a MySQL database for use as a web archive that's searchable.
I noticed that many of the subjects have RE: FW: FWD in front of them (obviously), but wondered if I didn't need to manually strip these out to get a grouping by subject when outputting database results to the web page.
Maybe there's a PHP/Mail or PEAR class that will automatically handle message grouping/threading that I'm not aware of. Thanks for your help!
The proper way to thread them is not by subject, but rather by the Message-ID and References headers. The References header will contain a comma-delimited string of all the previously related Messgage-ID headers. By using these, the actual content of the subject line becomes less relevant since it can get modified and mangled. In other cases, you might get many separate threads with subjects like "Need help please" that should not be threaded together.
You probably want to look into the References and In-Reply-To email headers. These give you information about which email the current email is in reply to.
There's a good algorithm for threading email based on this information here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html
Alright, this may take a moment or two to explain:
I'm working on creating an Email<>SMS Bridge (like Teleflip). I have a few set parameters to work in:
Dreamhost Webhosting
PHP 5 (without PEAR)
Postfix
MySQL (If Needed)
What I have right now, is a catch-all email address that forwards the email sent to a shell account. The shell account in turn forwards it to my PHP script.
The PHP script reads it, strips a few Email Headers in an effort to make sure it sends properly, then forwards it to the number specified as the recipient. 5551234567#sms.bridge.gvoms.com of course sends an SMS to +1 (555) 123-4567.
This works really well, as I am parsing the To field and grabbing just the email address it is sending to. However, what I realized that I did not account for is multiple recipients. For example, an email sent to both 5551234567 and 1235554567 (using the To line, the CC line, or any combination of those).
The way email works of course, is I get two emails received, end up parsing each of them separately, and 5551234567 ends up getting the same message twice.
What is the best way to handle this situation, so that each number specified in TO and CC can get one copy of the message.
In addition, though I doubt its possible: Is there a way to handle BCC the same way?
If you check the headers of the mail, you should find a Message-ID field (according to RFC2822 - section 3.6.4). So you could test if you have already sent an SMS for a mail with the same Message-ID & phone number to prevent sending the same message to the same number twice.
Why not use something like imap to check the catch-all mailbox, loop through the messages and then delete them once finished? That way you don't need to forward them to a seperate account.
Stupid dirty solution: parse all recipients from the mail, then send them SMS, then put em all into temporary table with md5 of message text. And check all incoming mails against this table.
Although wimvds had the best answer here, I found out elsewhere that Dreamhost includes a "X-DH-Original-To" header in the way I'm running it through the system. Using this, I'm able to send to each number individually upon receipt of the email without checking it against a database. This should also work with Blind Carbon Copy (I don't know the specifics of how email works enough to tell you how that works).