Email Process

How to send emails with WEM responsibly

Tips for correct and responsible use

Sending emails with WEM is pretty easy. It only requires a configuration for SMTP Server to use and a proper sender address.

Here are a few pointers to use the Email Process responsibly:

1. Always provide correct and complete contact information within the body of your message, especially when external recipients are used. Make sure your recipients can understand where the message is coming from and how to get in contact if necessary. Use Template Fragments to easily re-use standard email content parts like contact information.

2. Preferably use a specific sender address, recognizably linked to the organization or the application, so recipients can easily and correctly link the message to the proper application/organization - even when they have no prior information or knowledge about it. This will yield a higher trust level in your recipients and will help to avoid spam situations. Read about SMTP Settings here to make this work correctly.

3. In case you want to use a "no-reply" account as sender, you should provide a correct Reply-To address, so recipients can send a direct reply which will actually get to someone that can follow up. Without the reply-to setting, replies from recipients will be sent back to the no-reply account and then may not be followed up.

4. When you test your project (in Preview or Staging), make sure to test with actual and existing recipient addresses that you or your team have access to. Only then you can test the e-mail feature properly (check if messages get delivered properly with correct contents).

5. AVOID the (deliberate) use of dummy email recipient addresses that go nowhere - this will lead to Non-Delivery-Reports and unnecessary server-traffic and may even lead to blacklisting of your SMTP Mail Server. If you do not need to send an email, then don't send the email.

6. Build functionality in WEM around the Email Process Node so you can SKIP sending e-mails if that is not really part of the test: when you do not really care if and how messages are sent - then don't send them. Use Decision Nodes with IsPreview(), IsStaging() and/or IsLive() expressions to control the situation, and perhaps provide an overlay or a setting to specifically send or skip sending emails during tests.

7. Be careful when using loops and sending bulk emails, too many messages can cause blacklisting or can trigger the mailserver to stop sending. You can add a Wait process node to add some waiting time between sending messages.

You can also find info in this Forum Post

SMTP Settings

Please make sure you have the proper settings in place when you are sending emails from your own domain... The From-address used to send messages must be an account that is allowed to send messages from the selected SMTP server (same domain or otherwise configured to be allowed)

Configure the connection to your own SMTP server For message to be sent through your mail server, you can add your SMTP server's information to the SMTP settings of your Workspace in WEM (go to My Workspaces, select the workspace and click SMTP settings). Add host, port, username and password [optional but recommended]. On a workspace, you can add multiple SMTP servers. See SMTP Settings. In your portal settings, you can choose your SMTP server for the specific portal - from the list of SMTP Server Profiles setup and made available for the Workspace.

Using your own (corporate) mail server for handling emails has the additional advantage of logging and providing information:

• When your messages cannot be delivered to recipients, the Non-Delivery-Reports will be available on your own mail server, so you can act on that information.

• Also, all sent items can be found in the mailbox of the used sender – available for review, follow-up, or just evidence that a message has indeed been sent.

If you want to use IP-whitelisting on your SMTP-server, or use an Exchange Connector to allow incoming SMTP traffic from your WEM Application, you need to know the IP address for the WEM Server that sends out the SMTP traffic.

For portals running in EUR zone, use [185.3.209.154] as the IP-address from which WEM is sending the emails.

For portals running in APAC zone, the outbound mail will come from [52.189.211.222].

Image in E-mail

After some trials and tests, the current conclusion is that the Outlook Desktop email client is not properly rendering html tags and always shows images with their original dimensions. No matter what you try to do with html containers and styles and settings to change dimensions, Outlook Desktop will ignore all.

Generally the idea is to create a container (preferably a basic html-table with <tr> and <td>), set its width using static size in pixels, this should work for most html-based email clients. Just not Outlook.

If you want to display images in e-mail body in Outlook using a specific size, you really need to resize the image. An online image resizer service can be used in WEM (using http get request node), like https://imageresizer.io/ (Which original poster Arthur has found and used). WEM has its own Process Node to Resize Image that you can also use for this purpose.

More about this problem and the discussion around it can be found in this forum post.