About the mail api again, the surrounding services gae is proud of

[Tapir]

I found there are not exceptions thrown even the recipient email
addresses don't exist at all.

In my app, half new users didn't activate their accounts.
I doubt they haven't received the activation mail.
But how do I know if the new users have received the activation mail
or not?

Someone argued that the new gae price is high is for gae has many
surrounding services.
But we don't need lame surrounding services.

This problem is URGENT. I'm losing new users now.
I hope gae team can resolve the problem soon.

[milosh zorica]

you can use a nifty old trick by placing an ''invisible'' image
somewhere within a message so if a user reads a message, image file on
your server gets accessed

the simplest receipt verification technique though

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[Tim Hoffman]

Hi

That will only tell you they read it, if they have images enabled by default.  I don't for instance in my email.

If they don't read it with images enabled you can't tell if it was not delivered or just unread.

I wouldn't expect exceptions to be raised from bogus email addresses unless they are malformed, but I would expect a bounce email back to 

admin email account. Which would be an indication of non-delivery.

Rgds

Tim

[milosh zorica]

makes sense but he needs read receipt more than anything else

a bounced back message could indicate non-delivery but not 100% sure
though tapir's main concern is did they read it or not

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[Tim Hoffman]

HI Milosh

Unfortunately there is no guarunteed way to be sure someone has read the mail sent.

In fact it would in some cases be considered an invasion of privacy ;-)

If's not fundamentally part of email. and read receipt implementations are very much 

mail server dependent.

The most you can say about any sent email (after a number of days) with correctly operating mail servers is that it was 

delivered to a mail server ;-)

And the OP was complaining about not having exceptions raised when non-existent emails where used to send email. Which is

definately not something I would expect would happen via the mail api. OP said  "I found there are not exceptions thrown even the recipient email addresses don't exist at all. "  I am not sure how the mail api could possibly do this, as you may not get the fact that the email bounced because of a non existing email address for days. 

Rgds

Tim

[milosh zorica]

nicely put, tim

probably having more alternative ways to verify users is the way to go

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[milosh zorica]

an interesting find

though not neccessarily related to the OP's problem

http://mixpanel.com/api/docs/guides/email-analytics

[de Witte]

Tapir,

We use the same system. After a week we delete all records without activation enabled. Nothing to do about it.

Make it clear in the form that the user has to enter a valid email address. We have a rate of 10% not activated.

[JH]

I like to make people enter their email address twice, like a
password. It's amazing how many people misspell their own email.

[nischalshetty]

I had once read in one of the threads here that email from gae gets marked as spam on yahoo. Apart from that, it was also mentioned by one of the GAE devs not to rely on this for mission critical emails. There are other services that would suffice your need.

Having said that, have you tried registering on your site and checking if the email is being sent? How do you know that the reason for them not confirming is because they did not receive the confirmation email? 

• Users might be just lazy to confirm the subscription
• Your email might have landed in their spam folder
• They might have provided you with a fake email
• They might have misspelled their email
• They might think your email is a welcome email and hence just ignore it  - see this

Having said that, I'm not implying GAE is indeed sending all the email, just giving you more options to explore :)

[Tapir]

I tried sending emails to some fake addresses, but there is no errors
thrown and mails bounced.
So I can't know if an email is sent successfully or not.
If an email is not sent successfully, gae should tell developers what
happened, right?

On Sep 13, 1:05 am, nischalshetty <nischalshett...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I had once read in one of the threads here that email from gae gets marked
> as spam on yahoo. Apart from that, it was also mentioned by one of the GAE
> devs not to rely on this for mission critical emails. There are other
> services that would suffice your need.
>
> Having said that, have you tried registering on your site and checking if
> the email is being sent? How do you know that the reason for them not
> confirming is because they did not receive the confirmation email?
>

>    - Users might be just lazy to confirm the subscription
>    - Your email might have landed in their spam folder
>    - They might have provided you with a fake email
>    - They might have misspelled their email
>    - They might think your email is a welcome email and hence just ignore it
>     - see this<http://bvckup.tumblr.com/post/9101329123/please-confirm-your-email-ad...>

[JH]

The mail api may not send the email immediately, I'd imagine it hits a
queue first. So it can't throw an error on bad email addresses. The
only solution is to return bounced emails via the return-path. GAE
has never supported sending the user bounced emails. If you need this
functionality you will need to use a 3rd party email service.

[Nick Johnson]

Hi Tapir,

There's no way for the mail API to determine if an email address is valid synchronously (before the call returns). If the domain exists and has an MX record, the only way to determine if the address is valid is to send the message to it - and sending email is something that happens asynchronously, and is subject to queueing and other delays standard for a mail system.

The only way to determine this at runtime would be to set a reply-to address that your app controls, and look for bounce messages (which have a specified format). This is a feature of email itself, not a limitation of the Mail API.

-Nick Johnson

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