I have a C# Mailkit program that automatically sends emails to an email list. I have a web server with a database filled with email addresses and I want to incorporate an unsubscribe link within my emails. Is there any way of tracking the email address of the person who clicked the link? I essentially just want to remove the email from the database of the person who unsubscribed.
Are there any kind of special links/anything I can do to pull the user's email address after they click the link?
thank you.
"When creating email message with mailkit inside the body create unsubscribe link which contains email in query parameter.Like in my example above. That link needs to point to your web server on specific endpoint which can read email address from that query string and remove it from datsbase. – SlobodanT"
"Don't use encryption for this. Don't pass user information like emails in links. When you send a user an email, store a GUID for that user or email and include it in the unsubscribe link; something like http://example.com/unsubscribe/GUID HERE. Your unsubscribe page looks up the email or user and unsubscribes them. – Dour High Arch "
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I want reply to link similar to mail to.
I generate email string from c# code and want to put reply to link which replies to current email. Can anyone help to put reply to link in c# code?
for example: to generate mailto link we use mailto:testemail#gmail.com?subject=testsubject.
By clicking on this link, we are able to mail to particular emailid.
Similarly, I want reply to link by clicking on it, user is able to generate email as reply to current email.
Assuming you are showing your user an existing email which they are trying to reply to ? There is no HTML tag that does this.
You haven't said where this email is coming from, but I assume you are showing your user an email or other communication that is generated in your system. If this is the case they you will need to code this up just like any other POST link and pass in the "id" of the email you want to reply to - the result of the POST should be a redirect to an email-like page where you have programmatically filled out much of the email content by quoting it from the original email.
Once the user has filled out this Reply mail page, another HTTP POST back to your server and you can use the .net SMTP capability to construct an actual email and send it from your server. Note that there is no capability of sending such and email from your users mail account, or using their mail client.
I am working on an asp.net job website. each company can post a vacancy and email address to contact to. I have found that competitors are copying the vacancies and email address from my site. How can I get rid of this ? What if i show a dummy email address on vacancy but when user copies this email address and sends email, it goes to actual vacancy email ? Is this possible using asp.net ?
Well, if your purpose is only to hide the mail id, why show it in the first place?
You could easily provide a mail link/button, and send an email using .net mail functions.
The mail address is available in code behind, but you don't write it to the page. If its not in the response, they can't copy it.
If the information is on your website, I don't think you can stop other people from copying the links.
You could add a button to a form where the user can add details to a set of fields which you then send on to the advertising company. This is how lots of job websites work.
The Main Agenda behind this question is that I want to replace a dynamic holder in my Email body with the email address who has received the mail
We would be using the standard procedure using asp.net, i.e. Making an Email Body then by using the smtp.send(), would be sending the mail to the concerned email address. But I would like to have a place holder in my email body (e.g. Thanks for reading the mail, xxx#yyy.com), such that the xxx#yyy.com gets replaced by the one who is openeing the mail.
Now here comes the interesting part..... the user that i sent the mail (e.g xxx#yyy.com) if forwards the mail to some other email address (e.g abc#zzz.com), then when abc#zzz.com opens the mail he would see "Thanks for reading the mail, abc#zzz.com".
Is it possible in the first place ?
I don't believe what you're asking is possible. When you generate and send the email, the email body is composed on the server side, hence you have full control over it. Once the user has it in their email box, you no longer can change the content of that email.
An Email's content can't change - that kind of behavior would be similar to you running your code on the client's machine without their permission, i.e. a virus and is generally frowned upon.
I have difficulties implementing the following scenario.
Let's say you have a web site with ability to send and recieve messages between users.
User recieves an email with notification he has a new message on the software system (doesn't matter in what it is implemented). He can respond to this message by sending a reply via email or by logging into the site and replying to the 'message' using the site.
In case of the first approach if user simply replies to the email notification, how can you (as a developer) know what 'message' (ID) is the reply for?
I'm thinking the info would be stored in the MIME extensions. Are the MIME extensions transfered to the reply of the message? If yes than the solution could be to see the data of the original message notification for wich the user replyes to.
Any ideas? Thank you
The only “reliable” way would be to encode that information in the sender's address to which the user replies; you could also put it into subject or body of the message, and “hope” that the user doesn't tamper with it. There is an “in reply to (message-id)” header, but a lot of existing eMail clients don't set the header properly.
The usual mechanism is something like this: create an eMail alias prefix, and the append a message-id-code fragment to the end; for example, if this was for a purchase order confirmation, you could create an eMail alias handling addresses of the form po-*#example.com, where * is the unique message ID. Then, when you send your message out, you'd put the appropriate address in both the From: and Reply To: headers. EG:
From: "Purchase Order Confirmation (#1234)" <po-1234#example.com>
To: "John Doe" <jdoe#example.com>
Reply-To: "Purchase Order Confirmation (#1234)" <po-1234#example.com>
Subject: Confirm your order (#1234)
Depending upon your mail server, you should be able to define a “separator” character (typically - or +) that is used to split up the parts of the “local part” (left of #) of the eMail address; there is typically then another mechanism to map a prefix to a script to handle all addresses of a certain form. The script interface is often very much like CGI on the web, sending in some environment variables and piping the message itself in on the standard input. If your app is primarily web-based, you might find it more “comfortable” to gather the incoming eMail body, and POST it to a private (perhaps http://[::1]/getMailReply) handler. This may help you reuse existing code more readily.
We have set up a catch-all email address on our server - for example catch-all#myserver.com. When we send emails to users, we encode the message id and any other meta information we may need in the from address. You can obfuscate this or not, depending on what your needs are. So, for example, if the user has a new message in the system whose ID is 100, the from address of the email we send to the user would be something like reply-to-message-100#myserver.com. Make sure that whatever format you use for the from address would never generate a real email address on your mail server.
So, when the user responds to this message, it will get sent to the catch-all inbox you have set up. From here, you have a number of choices to make on how you process this email. In times past, we wrote a little scheduled service that would run every few minutes and check this inbox for new emails, process them as you like (insert into db, send more emails, whatever), and delete the message since you're done processing it. This is fragile since email clients all have slightly different ways of sending emails and it becomes difficult to parse the variety of client messages out there.
The second way we've done it is by integrating with http://postmarkapp.com/ - which has an incoming email api that should go public soon (we got in on the beta). You'd set everything up the same way only make your server's catch-all address forward to the postmark incoming address you'll set up with Postmark, and then Postmark does the message processing and calls a webhook you also set up to do what you like with the object received.
I highly recommend Postmark, but even the homespun method worked effectively, for the most part.
-M
Just a followup to the previous answer, Postmark Inbound is now live and public http://postmarkapp.com/inbound For each email sent to your specially formatted inbound email address, you'll receive a JSON formatted web hook API call with all the email components, headers, attachments sorted for you.
I guess this is sort of two questions that are tied together.
Related questions have discussed how to read and parse email using pop3. I need to be able to do this, however, I want this to be able to work with any email address I need.
I am trying to allow users to submit content by emailing it to a unique email address, which will automatically know to which account the content should be associated.
Is there a good way to create these email addresses on the fly in C# and check these email accounts so for content submissions?
Alternatively is there a way to make a "wildcard" email account which gets all of the email sent to the domain and allows me to see what the to address was?
Most email servers will allow you to route all undeliverable email to a specific mailbox (though the details on how to do it will depend on the mail server). From there you should be able to get the address it was sent to from the To header of the message.
A much better method is to skip the inbox/POP-checking altogether and have your MTA (Message transfer agent) "send" incoming emails straight to your application.
Here's an example setup with PHP: http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php
Alternatively is there a way to make a
"wildcard" email account which gets
all of the email sent to the domain
and allows me to see what the to
address was?
Yes its called catch all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-all
It depends on your domain host/who you are using to handle your email on the specifics of how to do it.