►Q◄ For the email Experts...

BenHayat

Hi guys;

When I send an email from Aware, there are 4 things that I would like to track (either one or two or three or all).
a) Which emails got delivered
b) Which emails got Clicked
c) Which emails got opened
4) Which emails got responded to

How would I go about catching those events, in order to update my email tracking system in Aware?
I know there are services who provide that as part of eMarketing, so it is available and can be done, and I know we have a bunch email experts here as well.
How would I go about cracking this?
Thanks!

RentProperty

Hi Ben,

We've successfully implemented a very elegant solution in one of our applications called ComplexBox.com using a combination of Sendgrid, custom Processes, AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda & AwareIM Services.

Werner developed an Java plugin which we use to send the emails via Sendgrid API V2. Works tons better
than using smtp in our opinion since it's much faster and more reliable. It's also quite cheap. $10 for the first 40 000 emails.
Then we developed another piece of java code that we setup on AWS lambda in conjunction with an AWS API gateway that catches the webhooks and makes requests to an aware service for the status updates.

So using this solution you can have two statuses on your email...(the API call success 200/failure status) and then the delivery/click status of the email itself.

I spoke to him and we can Customize the plugins so that it can work with your email objects and then help you setup the entire solution (Assuming you have an AWS account and a SendGrid account) for $500.

If you are interested feel free to PM me and I'll put you in touch with Werner.

BenHayat

Hein, thank you kindly for the info. As of now, I have not decided which email service I'll be using when I go to production, but if I use SendGrid, I'll contact you.

tford

Hi Hein,

I'm intrigued by your solution using SendGrid. Can you give me some idea how you accomplish matching up the webhook responses to the corresponding email in the AwareIM application. My recollection when I explored using webhooks in another transactional email program was that AwareIM have a way of sending a custom ID in the header of the email sent to the email service which can then be referenced in the webhooks for that email.

Did you come across that dilemma? If so, how did you solve it?

Thanks!

RentProperty

Hi Tom,

Sengrid allows you to include unique arguments in the request when you send using the API, which they can then include in the webhooks they post to your desired endpoint.

The biggest problem we faced was that sendgrids webhooks include a attribute with the name smtp-id and as you know '-' is not a valid character in Aware attribute names. So there is no way to map that in aware IM. AwareIM boms out when receiving a request with a parameter not specified in your service object. That is why we use the proxy API gateway service to catch the responses and then trigger some custom code on Lambda to create a new post request in the correct format to send back to Aware.

Hope that helps. 🙂

Kind Regards

Hein

tford

Ahh .. that explains why the "extra" java code and AWS steps are in your process.

I was wondering when I read your original post since theoretically if AwareIM could send an identifier in the header of an email via SMTP, it should be able to also consume & process a webhook without an API, plug-ins, custom code, etc. Right?

RentProperty

Yup.... It took us hours to figure out why it's not working since it should be so simple... We tried the name mapping and everything, but there is just no way to get it to work if the Post contains any Characters in the attribute names that Aware does not allow.
Nice thing of course about having it as separate custom processes is that we have a lot more control over how things are handled.

We recently had a pretty big crisis with the incoming email in one of our systems (V5.9) whereby emails containing attachments with the same name is not delivered to Aware (I believe this bug is still there in 7). But since one of our systems are quite reliant on Incoming email and Support does not support 5.9 at all anymore we were forced to look at alternative solutions, so Werner came up with one whereby we use a combination of Amazon SES, S3, and Lambda to handle incoming emails. Basically emails go to amazon first then we process them using some custom java code on lambda. Here we can clean it strip out unnecessary attachments, rename and reorder them and then send them to Aware using a simple exposed service. 🙂 Took about a month to write the code and implement it successfully but now we have a SOLID incoming and outgoing email solution that is not reliant on Aware supporting it or not.

Would love to have more flexibility in the JSON services from within aware, but for now our biggest desire is for the IDE to get a Massive upgrade. Aware already saves one so much time but I believe that productivity can be Trippled by adding some basic modern IDE features such as CTRL-Click to jump to a reference object, attribute, query process etc. Or just the ability to keep the formatting in the rule editors. In large rules it takes forever to find something if everything is in one line. Also a search within that box will help tremendously. Neway... Hoepfully something like that is on the cards soon.

Regards

Hein