Email tracking in mail merge MS Word - c#

Online marketing portals such as SendGrid, Google, add an invisible pixel to email which when rendered by the server, the user opens the email is tracked.
I would like the same in MS Word-based email campaigns.
We have a web service that returns an image after accepting a token as a parameter.
The problem we are facing is that when we add the image URL in the Word template, the image API is called immediately. The image API should be called in Outlook/ other email clients only when a user opens the email.
How can this be accomplished?
Any advice here will be highly appreciated.

Related

How to get the users SMTP Server credentials to send an email from the users email in C#

I have been trying to figure out how to send an email from the users email for this C# application that is being sent to my company's venders. it creates a unique xml file for the users to send our company. the users email is the determining factor if the xml file gets in our system and tells us where it goes.
I tried to use the mailto but that won't allow attachments to be passed through.
I am at a bit of a loss here.

Is there any way to set email profile picture using MailMessage in C# or any similar methods that may do that?

I've made a very simple C# -based console application which sends email to the email receiver specified using MailMessage.To.
But I just couldn't find any resources on how to add or set up an email profile picture using C#.
Is there any way to do so by using C#?
If you mean someting like profile picture in Google email view I believe the profile picture is not a part of an email.
It's retrieved from your profile by Gmail when it displays the email and the result depends on whether you have the right settings for your profile.
Please see this answer for more info.

Submitting data through email using asp.net

I am creating a application that will send emails to users requesting some information to be filled.
The user must be able to fill the informations requested.
What should be the right approach to achieve this ,
A html form should do this or a link should be given to every different user
Email has no interactive capabilities, so you can't embed a form in the email message like you would in a webpage.
A decent solution is to embed a link in the email which takes the user to a page on your app where they can fill in a form and submit the answer to you, like with any webform.
Since you have an email for each user, you could generate the link as myapp.com/responses/${some_part_dependent_on_email}. Where the ${some_part_dependent_on_email} can be a hash of the email or some bijective function of the email. The first option requires that you do a more complex join to find out to which email a response belongs to, whereas the second one might expose users emails in the URLs, which is not so great.

HTML email "opens" not being tracked

Update
This question has gotten off on the wrong foot. Let me pose the question as follows:
Let's say I wanted to show my StackOverflow "flair" badge in the signature of an email in Outlook. Obviously, I would want the image to be refreshed whenever I reply to an email or forward the email. Now, assuming the I (and others) have decided to allow images to be downloaded from me (who in this case we'll call a "trusted source") then they would see my flair badge refreshed on subsequent loads. If I copy and paste this badge into a new email then the image will not refresh on subsequent page loads because Outlook has embedded the image and severed the link to original image.
I completely understand everyone's comments about spam but this question is more about Outlook VML and manipulation of it. If the answer is always and forever "spam! Off with his head!" then that's fine. I get it but it seems to me that there may be situations where someone may not want the default behavior of Outlook to modify an email that it has already accepted.
Original Questions
We have an internal mail system that dynamically generates and sends HTML emails. We have a web beacon generated by an HTTP handler. The system works as expected: users recieve emails and we track opens as the web beacon is called.
The problem occurs when someone takes that same email that they just received (and we just tracked) and copies & pastes the content (including the web beacon) into a new email in Outlook. Outlook embeds all images instead of maintaining the URL back to the web beacon.
Is there a way to generate an image through an HTTP handler such that the src of the image is maintained when pasted in Outlook?
No. There is not; That's how Outlook works.
Not only that, your use of "web beacons" is the primary reason that I and many others have our e-mail clients configured not to load external images at all except from trusted senders.

How do I enable users to send email from ASP.NET MVC?

I'm developing a web application in ASP.NET MVC, and I want users to be able to click on a new link and have it send an email through their default email client with information already filled in, how do I do this?
How would I do it if I wanted an email to be sent out when a new ticket was submitted in the help system?
From MSDN:
<a href="mailto:user#example.com?
subject=MessageTitle&
body=Message Content">
Contact Us</a>
If you wanted to send this email to all users of your application, you'd probably need to automate that part into a service that sends email automatically. You can send email through .NET without any interaction from the user.
Without having the particulars, I see you could do it as follows:
User adds Ticket to the database.
Asynchronous Service polls database for changes to that table.
When it encounters a new ticket, sends an email to a list of users using information from this Stack Overflow question.
The list of users would come from the database, or whatever mechanism you have in place to authenticate and authorize users. If it's Active Directory, it would come from members of that group.
Update
If the user wants to share that email with others, then why not let them pick who they want to share it with in Outlook?
At that point, you can leave off the email address and they can choose it when it pops up in their email editor:
Contact Us
That produces the following when you click on the link:

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