Image next to Contact name in Google's Inbox - google-inbox

When receiving emails in Google's Inbox, usually you get as image a coloured circle with the first letter of the contact's mail.
But in rare occasions, there will be an image placeholder, like for instance the example I paste for YouTube. (I know YouTube is owned by Google, but I have seen many other examples)
Is it possible for me to make my own address to have its own image, when someone received an email in Inbox? If so, how?

In Short, this is because you likely don't have a Google+ page with a linked domain matching your email address.
The longer version: Link is here...
EDIT: Seems like this is not a popular answer...
Here's a fuller version:
This Article seems to provide a good overall answer. I'll do a quick summary here.
As a takeaway:
Ensure your site is verified on Google+. This is done in Webmaster tools(link), and your webmaster must approve.
Ensure you have adequate email traffic (seems around 1k a week should do it).
When sending from a domain not matching Google+, you'll need to include a snippet of code in your email, and have Gmail approve the link.
Ensure that your email is authenticated against your domain and not your ESPs (or use the Featured Image markup).
This questions is related: Email Sender Image from Google+ Account

Related

Branch.io: Extract custom value from link

we're facing a problem right now: We're using the SMS gateway feature from branch.io which simply does not work properly worldwide (e.g. Lituanian cell phones won't receive any messages at all).
Therefore i need a fallback method for people that cannot receive an SMS to their phone with the downloadlink in the Appstore. (The branch.io Links have an effect on the branding of our app)
The fallback is to let them use a voucher code which COULD be generated from a custom value that we store for each Link
This is an ordinary Link with its 2 custom values
The landing page http://learnmat.ch/spark7 opens in the browser and i'd like to be able to identify the SponsorID on the website so that i can return a voucher code that is suitable for the specific SponsorID of the Link.
Right now i've already integrated the Web SDK into the website.
Is that "reverse engineering of the SponsorID" possible based on the Link and the WebSDK integration?
I'd really appreciate your help!
Thank you,
Sven
Jackie from Branch here.
Our SMS page service supports international numbers but only if the number the SMS has to be delivered is in the same country the SMS is being sent from. Could you please make sure the sender is physically located in Lithuania? I'd also suggest creating your own Twilio integration if you want to bypass these restrictions we have on our system https://docs.branch.io/pages/web/text-me-the-app/#use-your-own-sms-service
Regarding your fallback method: you want to have users click on a Branch link that will open your website and based on the link data (sponsor ID), you want to provide them with unique voucher codes? If my assumption is correct, you can achieve this by custom event tracking and user identity tracking. (relevant docs: https://docs.branch.io/pages/dashboard/analytics/#user-value-attribution)
Hopefully, this helps. Let us know if you have additional questions about the info above, or about anything else related to integrating Branch.
Best,
Jackie Choi

Are email addresses and (unprotected) contact forms on websites a security-/spamer risk?

I could not find a clear answer to this question. I am looking for some up to date best-practice advice for the following two topics:
Displaying email addresses on my website (also linked via mailto:).
Having an "unprotected" contact form on my website (no captcha
etc.).
This is all for a static website served via aws S3.
I am afraid of getting hit by spammers.
How could I avoid this in an elegant way (ideally unnoticed by the user)?
Nothing you can do Nothing, you have no captcha therefore you are at the mercy of spammers.

Using Gmail API to update website when receiving an email

new to programming on the web so bear with me.
I've figured out that OAuth2.0 (the authorization protocol used by Gmail) is used for applications where Site A is given permission to information in Site B (in this case Gmail) by User X.
I am trying to create a website that updates when I receive an email from a specific sender. So, I am not using any of my website users' email information. I'm only using my own. I cannot seem to figure out (or even understand at a high level) how to permanently give my website access to my gmail account without doing some kind of user authentication on myself. What is the high-level process for giving my website this permanent authentication?
Let me know if I can make this clearer. Thank you in advance!
I've never done what you are trying to do, but you may find some useful answers here :)
Getting e-mail ID of sender while fetching mails from Gmail
I hope this helps if not I'm sorry. :)
UPDATE:
After reading that link a little bit more there are parts of it where they are getting the sender. You can always write a code to compare the sender by implementing what you need from that link. :)

Is there a message size restriction on gmail actions?

I wanted to add a convenient google actions link to an internal email we send (from: the same email address as the to: email same address). However, in the course of debugging it I realized the link only shows up for the shorter diagnostics messages.
Is there anything in the gmail actions code that requires the message to be a certain length or less in order for the action link to render?
As per my knowledge, There is no limitation on the length of the message for the "Go-to" action link. It helps users to go to your site which can be website/page/anything to complete the action.

How to block spammers from using my public email api

I am working on a web application which allows users to share stuff on a web-page by clicking on an 'email to friend' link; similar to what extole is doing here
http://www.american-giant.com/mens-heavyweight-full-zip-hooded-sweatshirt-product.html
on this page if you click on the email icon near "REFER & GET $15", you will see a pop-up where you can enter your own email and a friends email and can edit the subject of the email. When you click send the data is sent to the backend as json. They are using a plain simple url to do this i.e. http://refer.american-giant.com/v2/share.
The problem for me is that somehow spammers got hold of my url (can't mention here) and now they are using it to spam others by using some sort of a script. What I did is I placed a check in the backend api to block an ip if more than 5 share requests originate from it, but it seems that the spammers have a lots of ips (more than 30,000 from what I counted in my logs) so they are still able to send lots of email. One possible solution is to use a captcha to thwart the spamming script. But I am curious that how extole is doing it. They aren't using any captchas; and they are famous too, so it is unlikely that spammers don't know about their publicly accessible api. Can any one shed some light on this?
Note:
1. I am using a third party email service to send the emails.
2. Users are not required to sign in as this defeats the purpose of sharing on a simple website
3. Users can edit the subject and body, thus these are sent to the api call and this is what allows the spammers to abuse the api with their own stuff.

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