Testing Text-Based Emails - google-app-engine

I am using Google AppEngine API to send an email to my application's users. The email fields accepts html and body, where the former is the HTML version of the email and the latter is the plain text form. I can easily test the HTML version (to see how it looks) by sending an email to myself. But I am wondering how I can test the plain text version if all of the email providers nowadays are HTML based?

Send an email to yourself, then view the source. In GMail, for instance, you do this by clicking on the down arrow in the upper right corner of the message, then clicking "Show Original".

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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.

Open Gmail Client With File Already Attached

I see you can send emails with uploaded attachments using the Google Gmail API. However, I want the user to be able to preview the email before sending. It looks like there isn't a way to do this?
So essentially would the only solution be to create my own simple email client, then send the email through the API? Or would using the API even be necessary as in that case I could just use the server's native sendmail client to sent out the email with the user's gmail address as the return address.
I guess using the API, the advantage is the email would appear in the user's SENT folder.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a live preview that's available in a way you intended. As far as I know, Outlook (for reference) doesn't even have it. What they have is to upload the attachments while the mail is still being drafted.
The best I can think of is once the message will be sent, save it as draft at first and retrieve the mail again on the succeeding page. This will look like a preview that you intended. Once done, you can then finally send the drafted email to the receipients.

Manipulate the content of an email with gmail add on

Hi I am trying to develop a plugin for gmail that will read emails and manipulate the content of the email when it is read within gmail.
More specifically I want to change certain words within the email message.
I've already developed a plugin that can retrieve the email message and manipulate the message as a string but I don't know how to redisplay it.
Is this possible to do? If so which API do I need to use?
I wouldn't have thought you could change the content of an email once in Gmail other than to change labels etc.
One approach that might work would be to manipulate the email in the Gmail UI by using a Browser plug-in such as a Chrome Extension.

Email to automatically add calendar reminder to their calendars

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

Google app add attachment option to email

I want to create a google app that will let you add a file from a cloud service as an attachment to an email. From reading the google documentations it seems like you can't do anything while the user is creating an email, but the attachments.me app is able to do it. When composing an email, their app will pop up a button next to the regular attachment app letting you select an attachment from the cloud. I am new to working with google apps and I do not understand how attachments.me is able to do this. If anyone has an idea as to how this is possible please let me know, thanks.
To add features to the GMail UI you'd probably have to implement this as a Chrome extension (and/or Firefox or IE extension to support those browsers). In fact, this is apparently how attachments.me does it.
What the extension does is load when you go to gmail.com, identify a place in the UI where it wants to add its button(s), and inject them using JavaScript. You may then want to use JavaScript again to do something like add a link to the text of the email before it gets sent to the media you want to attach from the cloud, or intercept the "Send" button to tell your server to send the message with the cloud attachment included (assuming the user has authorized your server to send as them -- this can have serious security implications)
Beware, modifying complex web app UIs like GMail's using a Chrome extension can be very difficult; GMail may make changes that break your UI or functionality, and they may do it whenever they want, or only to a subset of users, so you'll have to constantly keep up with these changes to fix bugs. All in all I don't recommend it as a way of adding attachments to emails.

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