Emails: instead of Mandrill, et.al., try direct to GMAIL?

Jaymer

What if you made your users have a GMAIL account to use your AIM SAAS app., and
as part of their user setup, they entered their own gmail credentials.

When sending emails from your app [ this is not talking about system messages, past due notices, thanks for signing up, etc ], you populate the fields in the OutgoingEmailAccount for the LIRU, and then use that in the send.
Screen Shot 2018-03-06 at 1.15.07 PM.png
SEND Email TO OutgoingEmail.CRM_Contact USING OutgoingEmailAccount

This way, that actual person's Gmail account is used, and replies/bounces comes back directly to them.
You'd login regularly to the user's email account to retrieve any business emails and tie them to you comm. history.

I'm not able to get the FROM and Return-Path SMTP headers to work correctly in v8, so this seems like this would work without having to use/pay for an outside email service.

jaymer...

RLJB

Possible, but pretty sure there is a send limit thru GMail, used to be 200 a day if I remember correctly (haven't checked for a few years though).
....

We use Sendgrid... I "think" our FROM and Return-Path SMTP headers work correctly in v8... I'm going to check

mrbdrm

we use gmail for our users (3000) free with no issues

we have over 3000 users so i exported the users data (login-firstname-lastname) from aware and imported them to gmail to create the users.

then created the required incoming and outgoing account business objects for each user.
Thats it

Jaymer

mrbdrm wrote
we use gmail for our users (3000) free with no issues

thanks for replies.
So it appears your email is setup the way I'm suggesting in the original post?
And this lets me achieve my objectives of emails FROM that user, and being RETURNED to same user?

mrbdrm

Yes
every user has his own account.

Jaymer

mrbdrm wrote
every user has his own [GMail] account.

How do you handle the issue of GMail requiring "less secure access"?
(https://myaccount.google.com/lesssecureapps)

Now that you've created the initial 3000+ users, how do you create a single NEW GMail account when adding a new user? manually? api?
During creation, can you allow "less secure apps" at that time?
If a [new Aware] user already has a GMail account he wants to use, how do you [inside aware] tell him he's got to go to that GMail link and allow "less secure access"?

In another thread, someone said they use all sorts of web-apps and they've never had to make their users do "extra" work to use those functions (thats a poor paraphrase - can't remember the thread). So I'm wondering how users feel about "Oh, here's one more thing you have to do in order to get Emails working" if you make them go login to GMail to set that option.

thx

Jaymer

bump for mrbdrm

I was going to ask you some more Qs, and then I saw this unanswered.

One issue we're having using GMail API is the authentication box/login to Google that has to come up to let the App send email on the user's behalf.
Most of the time it works and its fine, but I have one case where it gets in a loop and acts weird. Re-log into Aware is needed.

So we're looking again at doing it with each user having their own email account record.
(NOTE: I will not be creating the Google account as you did - these users already have a GMail account)
So I have these Qs:
1) Is it then going to be necc. for each user to permanently store their Google credentials inside our database?
2) How do I handle the "approve less secure account access" checkbox thats needed?

ALSO _ If you've been reading the thread on Slow Email on Upcloud... Mark Bailey did a test for me today. He installed CRM demo app, and the email took 10 seconds to send. He thought that was normal, because its done that "always". But its not normal, it should be instant (sub 1-second).
Q: Whats the speed of 1 user sending 1 email through Aware's mechanism on your app?

THANK YOU - you might be the only other person using Google like this - we really need to solve this as its holding up our App. THANK YOU

mrbdrm

sorry Jaymer didn't notice the questions before.

in our app we create the new users email accounts manually since they are maybe one new user a week.
all the accounts have the option "less secure access" by default since we have the admin account for the g suite.
sending emails are instant to any email inside the organization or external like Hotmail or Gmail

now for setting the option "less secure access" for the users personal email, we didn't do it so i cant help with this.

have you tried the new REST in aware 8.1 to connect to the user email account? haven't tried it but it could be an option to try.
see this https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/auth/web-server
you will not need to handle "less secure access" option using REST and OAuth 2.0

Jaymer

Yes, I have successfully been sending GMail via REST in 8.1

I had to write a BASE64 Java plugin to encode the Email sent to them (built-in ENCODER wasn't the correct format).
As of Summer 2018, any issues in Aware REST were solved.
I am having a tiny Token Refresh issue that I'm trying to solve, but for the most part, sending emails thru Gmail works fine.