Rails - Jun 2013 - Introducing MailJack: autogenerate querystring parameters that are appended to links in your emails

Hey All,

I just wrote a nifty gem and wanted to share(its one of my first). 
Wondering if anyone would be so kind as to tell me what they think and/or 
code review it. 

MailJack - its like LoJack but for the links in your emails.  The problem 
this solves is the ability to track click throughs in emails.  

https://github.com/synth/mail_jack

Basically, you specify what mailers you want to track links in, and what 
query string parameters you want to include.  What''s cool is that you
pass
a Proc to each query string parameter that is evaluated at mail send time. 
 Here''s what the configuration looks like

MailJack.config do |config|
  config.mailers = [:user_notifier]
  config.href_filter = /#{MyApp::Application.config.host}/
  config.encode_to = :utm_source
  config.trackable do |track|
    track.campaign = lambda{|mailer| mailer.action_name}
    track.campaign_group = lambda{|mailer| mailer.class.name}
  end
end



 
So, *mailers* are your mailer classes that you want to track in underscore 
notation.  *Href_filter* is a regex that will be used to match hrefs in the 
body of your email.  This is useful so you don''t append parameters to
links
that go off your domain.  *Encode_to* is optional and lets you specify a 
parameter where MailJack will stash a base64 encoded string of your 
parameters.

In the trackable block, you can specify any number of parameters that you 
want to appear in the appended query string.  

So here''s an example.  For the following mailer: 
UserNotifier#welcome_email, all links in that email will have the following 
appended

?campaign=welcome_email&campaign_group=UserNotifier


Actually, since we have the encode_to parameter specified, it would 
actually appear as:

?utm_source=Y2FtcGFpZ249d2VsY29tZV9lbWFpbCZjYW1wYWlnbl9ncm91cD1Vc2VyTm90aWZpZXI

Ok, I hope this is useful to others, as its definitely useful to me!  And 
yes, feedback/code review is very much appreciated! :)

 

 


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Hi Peter. Pretty cool. I think the biggest thing you can do to improve the 
code here would be to write some tests for it, so you can give your users 
confidence that it won''t break with each subsequent release.

It would also be beneficial to include the word "Rails" in the
description
so that people searching for something like this in the context of rails 
have an easier time finding it.

On Thursday, June 6, 2013 6:48:21 PM UTC-4, PeterP
wrote:
>
> Hey All,
>
> I just wrote a nifty gem and wanted to share(its one of my first). 
> Wondering if anyone would be so kind as to tell me what they think and/or 
> code review it. 
>
> MailJack - its like LoJack but for the links in your emails.  The problem 
> this solves is the ability to track click throughs in emails.  
>
> https://github.com/synth/mail_jack
>
> Basically, you specify what mailers you want to track links in, and what 
> query string parameters you want to include.  What''s cool is that
you pass
> a Proc to each query string parameter that is evaluated at mail send time. 
>  Here''s what the configuration looks like
>
> MailJack.config do |config|
>   config.mailers = [:user_notifier]
>   config.href_filter = /#{MyApp::Application.config.host}/
>   config.encode_to = :utm_source
>   config.trackable do |track|
>     track.campaign = lambda{|mailer| mailer.action_name}
>     track.campaign_group = lambda{|mailer| mailer.class.name}
>   end
> end
>
>
>
>  
> So, *mailers* are your mailer classes that you want to track in 
> underscore notation.  *Href_filter* is a regex that will be used to match 
> hrefs in the body of your email.  This is useful so you don''t
append
> parameters to links that go off your domain.  *Encode_to* is optional and 
> lets you specify a parameter where MailJack will stash a base64 encoded 
> string of your parameters.
>
> In the trackable block, you can specify any number of parameters that you 
> want to appear in the appended query string.  
>
> So here''s an example.  For the following mailer: 
> UserNotifier#welcome_email, all links in that email will have the following
> appended
>
> ?campaign=welcome_email&campaign_group=UserNotifier
>
>
> Actually, since we have the encode_to parameter specified, it would 
> actually appear as:
>
>
>
?utm_source=Y2FtcGFpZ249d2VsY29tZV9lbWFpbCZjYW1wYWlnbl9ncm91cD1Vc2VyTm90aWZpZXI>
>
> Ok, I hope this is useful to others, as its definitely useful to me!  And 
> yes, feedback/code review is very much appreciated! :)
>
>  
>
>  
>
>
>
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