Send Grid Parse Webhook Guide
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Parse Webhook Guide |
Contents
Parse WebHook Guide
2 Introduction
3 How Fancy Hands Routes Incoming
Email
5 How iDoneThis Interactivity Increases
Productivity
6 Sendgrid Developer Evangelist Projects
8 Parse Webhook Technical Overview
13 Parse Webhook: Interaction and
Collection
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Contents
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Parse WebHook Guide
Receive Emails with
Incoming Parse Webhook
SendGrid makes it easy to send email. After all, “send” is right in the name. We also have an easy
way to receive email directly in your application. You can use it to welcome feedback, interact with
your customers or even collect data.
Make Email a Two Way Street
When it comes to our personal email accounts, we expect to both send and receive. If we get a
message from a friend, that friend could easily be offended if we don’t reply. Yet, with email sent
from applications so many of us have no mechanism in place to accept a message back. In many
cases it’s about getting our message to our customer’s inbox.
At SendGrid, we recommend not including “noreply” as your “from” address. Recipients should feel
messages are coming from a human who values them as another human. Engaging the recipient by
inviting a reply is the best way to achieve an air of friendliness.
Imagine how much more engaged a recipient would be if a reply was not only possible, but
encouraged. This guide is about the opportunities in flipping the email direction – at least for some
of your messages.
Common Use Cases
SOCIAL
SUPPORT
CONTENT
MANAGEMENT
ENDLESS
POSSIBILITES
Commenting is a staple of social
application interaction. Email
notifications of new comments
is an excellent way to re-engage
a user. Reply-able notifications
reduce the friction and encourage more conversation.
If you use software to provide
customer service over email,
you can use incoming email to
create, continue and resolve
help tickets. Create special reply
addresses for each issue and
allow the customer’s email reply
to go directly into your
support application.
Accept photos or other types of
content via email. It’s certainly
flashy to have a mobile app, but
integrating content via email
in addition means more ways
to get images, videos
or even the written word
into your application.
SendGrid developer evangelists
have used incoming email to
populate music playlists, put audience members on a map, play
chess and identify nutritional
content from packaging. The
beauty of the Parse Webhook
is your application can react
to incoming email however
you choose.
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Case Study: Fancy Hands
Parse WebHook Guide
How Fancy Hands Routes
Incoming Email to Assistants
Everyone gets overwhelmed with the many tasks that face
them each day. Fancy Hands is a service that takes many of
those off the shoulders of some very busy people. Fancy Hands
assistants perform short, virtual tasks like scheduling a doctor’s
appointment, 15 minutes of data entry or waiting on hold with a
credit card company.
To communicate with your assistant, you can use the
website, its mobile app or simply email. That last option is
extremely popular with Fancy Hands customers, with 50%
creating new tasks via email. Fancy Hands uses the Parse
Webhook to connect those emails into its backend for assistants.
50% of all Fancy
Hands tasks are
created via email,
more than any
other method.
Fancy Hands was founded by former New York Times web developer Ted Roden to scratch his
own itch. “When my wife had our first baby, we were in the hospital, and while we were still in the
recovery room I got a book deal,” Roden said. “So I had a full time job, a book deal, and a brand new
baby. If you asked me to do anything, I just couldn’t get it done.”
Roden built Fancy Hands so he could use it. The company has been a SendGrid customer since
day one, though it has not always used the Parse Webhook. Originally, incoming email came
via a feature of its cloud host. “We had a few problems with (the host). It couldn’t handle large
attachments gracefully at the time,” Roden said. “Our only option was to use really long email
addresses that didn’t reflect our brand and were annoying to users.”
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Case Study: Fancy Hands
Parse WebHook Guide
How Fancy Hands Routes
Incoming Email to Assistants
continued
Gathering attachments via the Parse Webhook is especially useful for Fancy Hands and its
customers. Because SendGrid can accept up to 20 MB in every email, large files or many files can be
easily attached to each task.
By using SendGrid and the Parse Webhook, Fancy Hands can focus on what it does best – helping
its customers focus on what they do best.
“We have all our code for the Parse Webhook in one small python file. It’s pretty simple. I
changed it about a month ago to handle a promotion we did, but normally, we don’t have
to touch it.”
– Ted Roden
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Case Study: iDoneThis
Parse WebHook Guide
How iDoneThis Interactivity
Increases Productivity
When Rodrigo Guzman was in grad school, he would lose track of
his physics research. Though he spent a lot of time working, the
days would blend together. He wasn’t really sure he was making
forward progress. So he started outlining the important things he
did each day on a calendar.
This problem of understanding one’s own productivity exists
outside of academia, too. Guzman founded iDoneThis to help
others use his simple trick to track their own important things
and share them with their team members. Every day iDoneThis
sends an email out to its users that requests a reply with what
each did that day. Since iDoneThis uses the Parse Webhook,
recipients can use the entirety of the application from their
email client.
Where the Parse Webhook really shines for iDoneThis is its team
reporting tool. Organizations and companies can use iDoneThis
to share their efforts. Communicating what everyone is working
on becomes easier, but only if collaborators use it. Even though
there is a web version of iDoneThis,70% of team members have
never visited it.
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Contents
Founded:
January, 2011
Sends:
750,000 emails/month
Receives:
300,000 replies/month
https://idonethis.com
70% of team
members use
iDoneThis only
via email sent
to the Parse
Webhook.
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Parse WebHook Guide
Examples From the Road
SendGrid Developer
Evangelist Projects
Proactively Remove Unengaged
Email Addresses
SendGrid has a team of developer evangelists
who travel the world helping developers better
use technology. The evangelists are all engineers
themselves and often build projects that are fun
or useful. This section shows a sampling of some
of their projects that use the Parse Webhook.
Kunal Batra’s first hack as a developer evangelist
uses the Parse Webhook and OCR--optical
character recognition. Snap a picture and send
it to Kunal’s special email address. The Parse
Webhook accepts the email and posts it to his
script, where the photo is sent to an OCR API for
processing. Then Kunal’s script emails a rich text
attachment with the text.
Convert a Picture to Editable Text
Enable a Memorable 21st Birthday
When Nick Quinlan joined SendGrid he wasn’t
even of legal age to drink in the United States.
Since his first hackathon as an evangelist
coincided with his 21st birthday, Nick built an
app that would help the hackers choose his
first drink.
As Nick demonstrated the SendGrid APIs, he
invited the audience to email with one of five
options in the subject line. The screen autopopulated as results came in. The crowd was
impressed and, after the hackathon ended,
Nick did have his first drink.
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Examples From the Road
Parse WebHook Guide
SendGrid Developer
Evangelist Projects continued
Relive Childhood and Fight a Dragon
Yamil Asusta fondly remembered Pokemon from his childhood. So he built an app that allows
audiences to fight a dragon, like he used to do playing the Pokemon card game.
Each new email that comes in is an attack on the dragon and the total hitpoints decrement by the
level of the hit. Yamil’s app then replies back to the emailer with an overview of the hit, while the
entire audience watches the animation projected on the screen.
While these examples are mostly fun, hopefully they give you an idea of the many things possible
with the Parse Webhook.
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Parse WebHook Guide
Parse Webhook
Technical Overview
The Incoming Parse Webhook allows you to receive email as JSON from within your application.
Don’t fiddle with server-side configurations and cross your fingers they’ll keep processing messages.
Don’t bother parsing headers to determine who an email is from or where the subject begins or
ends. Just set up the webhook once and focus on your application.
How to Configure the Parse Webhook
Configuring the Parse Webhook requires very few technical changes. You’ll need to make changes to
your DNS settings and your SendGrid account.
1
Add SendGrid as an MX record in your DNS settings.
In order for SendGrid to receive email on your behalf, you need to add an MX record to your
DNS settings. Many times these settings will be within the company where you registered your
domain name or a web hosting provider.
Add a new MX record for your domain or sub-domain and point it to:
mx.sendgrid.net
To use the Parse Webhook, SendGrid needs to receive all email for a particular domain or
sub-domain. You don’t want to use the same domain name where you already receive email.
Instead use something like m.yourdomain.com or a special domain name just for your
Parse features.
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Parse WebHook Guide
Parse Webhook
Technical Overview continued
2
Enable the Parse Webhook within the SendGrid control panel.
This is the easy part. Once incoming email is flowing through to us on your behalf, we just
need to know where to redirect the email that is parsed.
Enter the following information to enable the Parse Webhook:
• Domain or sub-domain where users will send email
• Full URL (likely on your server) where the webhook should send email data
• Check whether you want SendGrid to perform a basic spam filter on incoming email
Once saved, you’ll see the settings on your Parse Webhook page. Now you’re ready to
test it out.
Receive Email Via JSON
Emails arrive on most email servers as a whole mess of text. An un-parsed email includes headers
that most recipients never see. Even the to, from, cc and subject are just plain text that software
must separate out manually.
The Incoming Parse Webhook makes this process a whole lot easier. SendGrid does the work of
parsing the email fields you expect, plus other useful data.
Field Label
lheaders
The raw headers of the email.
text
Text body of email. If not set, email did not have a text body.
html
HTML body of email. If not set, email did not have an HTML body.
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Description
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Parse WebHook Guide
Parse Webhook
Technical Overview continued
Field Label
from
Email sender, as taken from the message headers.
to
Email recipient field, as taken from the message headers.
cc
Email cc field, as taken from the message headers.
subject
Email subject.
dkim
A JSON string containing the verification results of any dkim and domain keys
signatures in the message.
SPF
The results of the Sender Policy Framework verification of the message sender and
receiving IP address.
envelope
A JSON string containing the SMTP envelope. This will have two variables: to, which is
an array of recipients, and from, which is the return path for the message.
charsets
A JSON string containing the character sets of the fields extracted from the message.
apma_score
Spam Assassin’s rating for whether or not this is spam.
spam_report
Spam Assassin’s spam report.
attachments
Number of attachments included in email.
attachmentX
These are file upload names, where N is the total number of attachments. For
example, if the number of attachments is 0, there will be no attachment files. If the
number of attachments is 3, parameters attachment1, attachment2, and
attachment3 will have file uploads. TNEF files (winmail.dat) will be extracted and have
any attachments posted.
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Description
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Parse WebHook Guide
Parse Webhook
Technical Overview continued
Access Attachments
The possibilities are many just with the textual component of email. By providing access to the
attachments in an email message, the Parse Webhook becomes even more powerful. Each message
can be up to 20 MB in size, including the headers, message and attachments.
Attachments are posted to the webhook as multipart MIME data. Your application can access
attachments the same way as file uploads from a form.
For example, the PHP code to save every attachment to the /tmp directory could look like this:
foreach ($_FILES as $key => $file)
{
move_uploaded_file($file[‘tmp_name’], “/tmp/”.$file[‘name’]);
}
The JSON posted to the webhook also contains some meta-data about the attachments. In addition
to the number of files, each attachment has its own collection with the filename and other details.
For example, here’s what the first attachment might look like:
“attachment1”:{
“originalFilename”:”filename.jpg”, “path”:”/tmp/2-w6psz.jpg”,
“headers”:{“content-disposition”:”form-data; name=\”attachment1\”; filename=\”filename.
JPG\””,”content-type”:”image/jpeg”},
“size”:80180,”name”:”filename.jpg”,”type”:”image/jpeg”}
Additional attachments would use attachment2, attachment3 and so on.
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Technical Overview
Parse WebHook Guide
Parse Webhook:
Interaction and Collection
Much like sending email through SendGrid, the Parse Webhook is a blank slate for you to add your
creativity. The mundane details of separating out the sections of an email and routing an incoming
message to your script are done for you. The rest requires some ingenuity.
The common use cases, case studies, developer evangelist examples and technical overview should
give you somewhere to start. Also consider situations where you’re interacting with your users or
collecting data within your applications. When all the Parse Webhook examples are boiled down,
those are the two most common ways it is used.
Frequent tasks can be made more productive if your users never have to leave their inbox. Make
your email interactive and collect insights from users with a simple email.
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About SendGrid
SendGrid helps you focus on your business without the cost and complexity of owning and maintaining an email infrastructure. We manage
all of the technical details, from scaling infrastructure, to ISP outreach
and reputation monitoring, to whitelist services and real-time analytics.
We offer world-class deliverability expertise to make sure your emails
get delivered, handle ISP monitoring, DKIM, domain keys, SPF, feedback
loops, whitelabeling, link customization, and more. To learn more, visit
www.sendgrid.com.
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Contents
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