A website that I used my password on was compromised and the monkeys in charge had stored everything in plaintext. The list was released publicly online. Needless to say, my password and email were among them.
I would like to send emails to everyone else who was listed (thousands) and inform them that to continue using their password is unsafe. My language of choice would be C# and I would be sending them from my gmail with the help of this code: Sending email in .NET through Gmail
I can pretty much assume gmail will lock me out before I finish 10 in under a minute. Apart from sending emails out intermittently, how can I do this?
edit: I agree with the responses. I should instead send one email. Is there a limit to the amount of recipients I send an email to from gmail?
If happy to spend a bit of money for a reliable solution, you could integrate (very easily) with http://sendgrid.com. Provides you with heaps of features to track delivery of email and reporting/analysis of email opening, clicking etc.
Gmail does have limitations on how many emails you can send per day, and I would not recommend for your usage.
Or use some online mail marketing tool like MailChimp http://www.mailchimp.com
This service can easily send thousands of e-mails without problems. They have a free service too. Where you can store up to 2,000 subscribers. Send up to 12,000 emails per month.
It even has a REST API available for interacting with it from a custom app.
However I don't know if you are legally allowed to sent e-mails to the addresses on the list. I know it's for a good cause, but please be warned that this sort of e-mails can be considered as spam.
Again, don't build it yourself, but use off-the-shelf specialized services: I suggest looking at
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
which is part of Amazon Web Services (cloud storage, computing and more).
Amazon SES lets you send bulk and transactional email to customers in a quick and cost-effective manner
Service highlights include:
Simple
Inexpensive
Reliable
Scalable
Related
I'm trying to understand exactly what it is I need to be implementing and am just after a little guidance. I know very little about email standards such as POP3, IMAP, SMTP which is probably what's making the getting started difficult.
What'd I'd like to do consists of a couple of things:
Be notified of the arrival of an email at a specific custom address. e.g. hi.me#myapp.com.
Handle multiple addresses per user.
Be able to process this email and either delete it, leave it and be able to display in a web email client or forward it on based on various rules.
I've seen a few SMTP libraries and a POP3 one, but I'm not 100% sure what I need to do this. I'm guessing the best way would be to write a full C# mail server - but I'm hoping for a little guidance/suggestion.
Thanks
If you really want to build a mailserver from scratch, the protocol specifications are all available as RFCs.
For IMAP that would be RFC-3501 and for SMTP RFC-2821, you can google for the rest.
I've been working on a C# SMTP server in my (very limited) spare time, mostly out of frustration with existing MTAs and as an exercise in C# server programming. I can tell you that there's a bit more to it than you might think. So if you want fast results, I'd seriously consider hooking into an existing MTA/mailserver setup.
Depending on how fast you want to process messages, it may be sufficient to poll one or more mailboxes. You could process the messages and, for example, forward them to another mailbox using the built-in .NET SmtpClient.
On top of that, all mail servers I know of implement not just the SMTP protocol but also a slew of anti-spam measures. Most of these measures have matured over many years. You get all that for free if you build on top of an existing mail server infrastructure.
Then again, configuration of just about any mail server I know seems to be a fine art, hence my frustration with them.
I was not sure what StackExchange site to put this under, but as it is (sort of) related to programming I am posting it in here.
I am developing a web application which will send a maximum of around 700 emails a week (it is likely that this will be concentrated around a few consecutive days in a week). When I made a prototype of this application, I used my gmail account to send these, however, as it is imperative that the emails are sent, I wondered if someone could give advice as to whether gmail would be able to handle this (from a technical perspective and their Terms of Service), and if not, whether there were any suggestions about an email service that could handle this (preferably a free alternative!).
Thanks in advance
I've searched online to see if ELMAH can send daily emails and from the reading I've done, the developers say to use the RSS feed instead of emails. See this post for details. My company wants a daily email sent using ELMAH. Does anyone know if this is possible or of any workarounds for sending daily emails with ELMAH?
Where do your log your errors to? Database/ File / RAM? I would imagine that, for all of the back-end storages supported by ELMAH, except RAM, you could easily write a console app to send this daily email summary that you want.
For what is worth, look at the System.Net.Mail.MailMessage and System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient classes on MSDN.
I have a customer service web app requirement, which requires that I work pull & integrate data from Gmail, eBay, Amazon, and Paypal. My solution is going to be developed in ASP.Net 4 with C#.
The issue that I'm running into is that my client needs pretty much all of the information that Gmail has about each and every email that comes in & the ATOM feed coming from Gmail seems to be a bit lacking. I realize I can also use POP3 or IMAP, but they too are lacking for a number of reasons.
Specifically, the client needs the read status of emails (whether or not THEY have read emails that were sent to THEM). They also need for all of the filters to remain intact. So if an email is tagged with x,y, & z, then I need to know about it.
The ATOM feed only shows me unread emails, so that's out.
POP3 has no clue (and rightfully so) whether or not they've read an email or not (unless I pull it into a database and manage read status, myself...but that doesn't work if they actually read a mail from within gmail itself).
IMAP seems like it would give me everything I need, but I'm not 100% sure on that. What do you all think? Also, IMAP is SOOO slow. Is anyone aware of any decent libraries that are fairly fast. We're talking about a customer inbox with some 360,000'ish messages at the present time, & the client would prefer to keep those messages at gmail & not work with a disconnected database.
Thoughts / Opinions?
IMAP does provide read/not-read status for each message and you can pull from particular 'labels' (folders) or just pull from the 'all messages' bucket. You don't need to pull the entire message either, you can ask for headers only, giving you the ability to quickly scan many emails.
I've been working on a program to pull my entire gmail dataset down for my own tinkering and processing. I'm using linux, and while there are a multitude of imap 'mirror' and imap 'processing' applications out there, I just want to play with the data, being able to do what I want with it, without stuffing it back into an imap server locally. It's been working decently and I'm using the email's UID (modified slightly) as a file name to dump the headers & email data. Of course, you could massage the data and update a database or whatever at that point, I'm just stashing it for post-processing later. Looking for trends in my email, mostly tinkering.
I tried using the etpan libraries for IMAP processing, didn't find them to my liking, so I've been pulling imap routines from other email programs and servers to play with. I have the RFC's, but really really trying to not reinvent the wheel here if I can help it.
Yup, not the best answer, but hopefully some information to help. I imagine there are nice libraries for PHP, or other web-based systems, I've been working with C++/C myself.
I need to implement the web application for sending marketing emails to the partners of the company. There are some requirements I have no idea how to solve it.
The first one is how to check if the email was delivered? I'm sending emails through smtp server.
The second one is how to check if the email was readed by receipient.
the third one is how to ensure, that emails did not go to spam.
I'm using .NET platform.
I will apreciate any help to any of this questions.
thanks
The first one is how to check if the email was delivered? I'm sending emails through smtp server.
The second one is how to check if the email was readed by receipient.
the third one is how to ensure, that emails did not go to spam.
TL;DR: You cannot do any of these using standard email protocols (ie. SMTP). There is no support in SMTP for acknowledgement or receipt or reading. There is no reliable mechanism to report failed to deliver: just ignoring is often done if determined to be spam.
Closed systems (eg. MS Exchange) can offer this kind of functionality where one organisation can set policies for all parts of the system end to end.
I suggest considering why The Evil Bit (RFC 3514) is not an effective security measure.
The only option I can think of is using what's often called a tracking pixel or web bug in your emails. Wikipedia has a comprehensive explanation of this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug.
However, it is easily bypassed.