Email, spam, multipart-alternative mime

JackGoa

JackGoa

Member
Hi, I know Fabrik uses Joomla to send mail. I recently setup a site that sends very important information to users once they submit their details. However, it seems most of the mails end up in spam and most people don't check their spam folders nowadays.

So I've found a site where I can test the email. One important thing I have noticed is that Joomla does not send a plain text version of emails. In my article email template, I also had to add html and body tags, which Joomla also does not add to the emails.

I was wondering, is there any clever person out there that might know if Fabrik can be used to also include a plain text version of an email? This deducts a whopping 1.1 from your spam score.

I've tried sending mail using SMTP instead of PHP Mailer, but got a worse score, so I went back to PHP Mailer as it seems we don't have Sendmail on our server.
 
Strangely enough I heard about this yesterday from Troester who experienced the same issue in the past.

Will have a look at the possibility of a plain text version of an email. It should be fairly straight forward to implement providing there is nothing on the Joomla side preventing this.

I've added it as a feature request:- https://github.com/Fabrik/fabrik/issues/1676
 
@felixkat I need to go back and look again, but when I looked in to this last month, it looks like the J! sendMail API is the problem, and it's not easy to work round. I'll try and find some time to dig into this more asap.

-- hugh
 
hi hugh. when you get around to playing with that thing, there is one more thing i notice missing from the emails. keeping in mind, i use an article as an email template. i toggle my editor to "off", then i add this to the body of the email:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">
<html><body style='font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif'>

and of course,

</body>
</html>

this wins an additional 0.6 on the spam score! another one of those things you would think J! would add? obviously, when i toggle my editor "on" and save, it removes that HTML.

oh and i use PHP mail, not sendmail or smtp.

i haven't forgotten, i still owe you. you're worked into my budget, promise, i can't forget. ps, didn't you used to have a donations page? i don't really want to subscribe at this stage.
 
Have you considered using a service like Send Grid? They have a free tier that allows up to 12k emails a month. Won't help with the message formatting, but their servers have excellent reputation scores.


Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk
 
i actually did a whole bunch of tests now trying smtp too. still the plain text issue, but with smtp it seems to add an X-Priority header which should not be there. and that costs 1.5 in spam score. i googled around wondering if I can somehow remove it, and all i get is links to acymailing where they removed it in their own code.

so i'm wondering, is this something fabrik might be adding to the mail headers?
 
We don't add any headers or do anything special, we just call J!'s mail API, pass it the addresses, mail body, subject, set HTML to true.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk
 
ah oki. thanks. yes, i'm actually trying to build my own "crm" in fabrik as it's different for each of my clients. each client needs different information etc. so i'm avoiding using marketing mailing systems.
 
You might want to try Mandrill. It no longer has a free tier, but there is a J! plugin for it, which is open source in github, which opens up possibilities for modifying the message format.

You didn't answer the question about Send Grid, which is a high quality mail delivery service you can use as your SMTP servers.



Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk
 
*when hugh says you did not answer the question, then you know you read wrong* i did, apologies, i see now i can use their smtp service, correct? i scanned the website and just noticed the words email marketing, so assumed it's a crm service. :p aplogies, *hat in hand* i'll investigate it.

BUT, while on the topic, i came across this thread: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=708&t=906357 seems, joomla is still using an older version of phpmailer and in the newer version that issue has been fixed. so now just to hope they include that new version soon.

then it seems it's just the plain text version not included that still creates an issue. is this a J! thing, or Fabrik thing?

*sorry for my stupid questions, you know my limited understanding of these technical aspects by now :D
 
I did a quick test with the http://www.mail-tester.com/ site you posted.

I created a very basic form and added a form plugin to send an email. I didn't use any templates, placeholders and just filled in the very basics to send an actual email.

The score wasn't fantastic as I don't have the email setup correctly on my test domain.

However it showed me the following:-

Code: 
Weight of the HTML version of your message: 108B.

Your message contains 100% of text.

I then changed a line of code I mentioned in the Github issue. I changed
PHP: 
$htmlEmail = true;
to
PHP: 
 $htmlEmail = false;

This time round it showed me the following:-

Code: 
There is no html version of your message.

So that option does appear to be doing what we want. However I don't know the impact once templates etc are being added.

jackgoa, maybe this us something you could test, if it works okay then it's very straight forward to add an option of this.

You need to edit file /plugins/fabrik_form/email/email.php and around line 98 just change the entry to false as shown above. Test, test, test and let us know the results.
 
ok, panic diverted, switched to php 5.5 and that got rid of the error above. there is some error in the new phpmailer library that gives problems with php 5.6. YES, they included the new phpmailer library which sorts out the x-priority issue mentioned above!!

as far as our test goes, felix, you are the bomb! that solved the problem! can i have a clap for a 10/10 perfect score on that site, sending via smtp. This is what it says now about the email format:

Checks whether your message is well formatted or not.
There is no html version of your message.

It will still display in html though in proper email client right? If I understand it, in a text email client it will just show the html tags too?
 
JackGoa said:
It will still display in html though in proper email client right? If I understand it, in a text email client it will just show the html tags too?
Click to expand...

I don't know to be honest I would have to look the the Joomla code. I would have though it was literally plain text i.e no tags as any tags would make it html.

Ah sherbet, ok I see the email now arrives as text in my email client. All HTML tags included...
Click to expand...

So is that good or bad?
 
Changing to PHP 5.5 fixed that smtp sending problem.

Well, in Outlook (html email client), I receive the email as text, so it does not strip the html tags, for example:

<p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hi,&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A new user has completed step 1 of the credit check application.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Name: Bj?rn</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Surname: text mail</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Cell: 083xxxxx</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Work number: 04158xxxxx</span><br />
 
So it is received in plain text format but with the HTML tags.

So is this what we want or do we want plain text with no tags?
 
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