Email to automatically add calendar reminder to their calendars - calendar

Is there a way to send mass email and automatically add a calendar reminder the users' calendars? I've found you can export an .ics file and link to that where users can import into their program of choice, but what about something that will do it automatically to any calendar? I've used this article to follow, but nothing for automatically adding to the user's calendar nor do we use that email service.
http://www.whatcounts.com/2013/07/feature-friday-add-calendar-events-in-publicaster-edition/

You can not force someone to automatically download the .ics, as you can imagine, auto downloading anything in email would pose a security risk to the reader.
All you can do is host the .ics (or any file really) on the web and hyperlink to it with a 'Save to Calendar' type linkin your email.

I believe there is no way to do this automatically. One of the important reason is JavaScript is not allowed by most of the email client.
I think the best way to show user a event and make it easy to add to their calendar is generate a .ics file and attach to the email as an attachment. Many email client, like Gmail, will find it and display it as a part of the email.
Here is a reference of .ics file format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar

Related

ical4J: make Outlook appointment info and actions display in emails

I am using ical4j (version 3.0.1) to send an email to an Outlook email address (Office 365). Here is what I see in an email:
You can see the Calendar.ics attachment and clicking on the down arrow allows you to add the event to your Outlook calendar. This works, but not good as the following one.
When I create an appointment in Outlook for someone, I can directly see the appointment info and action buttons (Accept, etc.) in the email, as shown below.
How can I do it through ical4j?
Update 1:
Due to Arnaud's input, I have made my code work by adding the following line:
icsCalendar.getProperties().add(Method.REQUEST);
and updating this link:
messageBodyPart.setDataHandler(new DataHandler(new ByteArrayDataSource(icsCalendar.toString(), "text/calendar; charset=\"utf-8\"; method=REQUEST")));
Your description does not include the icalendar stream so it is not possible to check whether all mandatory properties are present in the invitation.
Assuming that everything is fine with the REQUEST, you must then follow certain rules when constructing your email message. See Multipart email with text and calendar: Outlook doesn't recognize ics

Mail sent with sp_send_dbmail shows embedded images as attachments

I'm using sp_send_dbmail to send a "welcome" email to employees' newly provisioned mailboxes. The content looks good in both Outlook 2016 and in Office365.
There is a difference from the source email I'm replicating, however, in the how the attachments appear. The source email does not show a paperclip icon or attachments in either system. The email sent with sp_send_dbmail shows the paperclip in both and lists attachments in Office365 (but not in Outlook).
I copied the HTML from the source email in Outlook and had to change the src tags to get it to work:
<img ... src="cid:image009.png#01D42E2D.8043A5B0">
This wouldn't show the images until I removed the #01D42E2D.8043A5B0. I haven't been able to find any explanation of what that part of the tag does or how to use it properly.
Is there a way to make the message sent with sp_send_dbmail appear exactly as the original does?
Edit to add:
Further testing finds that TypeApp (an Android mail client) doesn't render the images from sp_send_dbmail, but it does display the source email correctly.
I realize that email clients won't behave consistently, but why can't I make the email I send behave like the other?
A possible workaround is to use SendGrid email. It might work differently with embedded images. Not sure.
In a previous project I hit a lot of various problems with our internal Exchange server, so I just went outside to SendGrid, which worked very well. They have a free tier.

Capturing Responses from iCal/ics file

I am generating ics/iCal files for events in a Web app and emailing them to users to add to their calendars. This part works great
I would like to require a response in the ics files and then capture their responses. I was under the impression I can specify a URL to my Web app in the ics file. Then I can parse the email and attendee status from the response format.
Is something like this possible? I can't find any ics documentation to handle something like this.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, this is not possible. It's possible to specify in an iCalendar object that a user should respond, (by using the relevant parameters in the ATTENDEE property), but the result will be sent back as an e-mail response.
unless the receiving user runs a caldav server with scheduling support.

Auto Saving in JavaMail

I am working on a simple mail application using JavaMail. My web based mail user agent (MUA) application has the functionality to compose, read, forward, delete, etc mails. Now I want to add a simple functionality that autosaves user's email to a Drafts folder while composing. The user can manually save his/her mail or the application can automatically save to the user's Drafts folder. So, is there a means to achieve this with the help of JavaMail? Or any other better way of achieving this?
Append the message to the Drafts folder. You'll have to figure out how to trigger the append from your application.

LiveCycle need to program submit by email button so attachment in xml/pdf is unique

for example, if i send this form to john smith and he enters his name in a field in the form and clicks 'submit by email", the attachment should be john.pdf or john.xml.
I get some weird documents like _ac324cxdsf and etc...
How do i fix this? Please let me know. thanx
here is the LiveCycle Designer submit email button description
The file that your users have downloaded is most likely in their temp folder. Acrobat/Reader then calls Outlook to create a new message with that file as the attachment. In order to use a different filename, the script in the form would have to change it, which would be a file system operation. Due to security reasons, Acrobat/Reader is not allowed to let PDFs do filesystem operations unless the user authorizes it. Seems like more trouble than it's worth to just rename the PDF attachment. What about having an automated inbox that checks the attachment when it comes in for the name, then renames it on your end?
-John

Resources