Today I had the challenge to display the plain text version of an email on a Windows device. I gave the Outlook setting “Read all standard mail in plain text” in the Trust Center a try, but it only removes the images and formatting from the the HTML version of the email.
Finally I found in the internet that Thunderbird is able to show the text version of a mailing. Here is the way to switch the view.
Sometimes you need to work with the URL of your CRM within Power Automate, for example:
to relate or unrelate two records with the Common Data Service (current environment) connector
or writing an email with a hyperlink to a record.
If you have a multi-staged environment and you build your Flow solution aware, you don’t want to update your static URLs after each transport.
Solution
‘Recycle’ the OData Id from a previous CDS action.
We need an previous CDS action that has an OData Id within its output (like shown above). If you have no action like this, consider to create a “List records” action which is limited to 1 by the “Top count” option.
Create a “Compose” action and give it the OData_Id as input.
Create an other “Compose” action and give it following expression to receive the CRM URL.
Email marketing tools automatic add query strings at the end of urls of your hyperlinks. That’s a common way to pass additional informations to the target website inside of hyperlinks. Mostly these are informations about which channel the visitor came and to which campaign the visit is related to.
Issue
The target website should validate the passed query strings and ignore them if it don’t know what to do with. But sometimes you a have target website that crash painfully with a 404 error.
Solution – Mask query strings
Instead of trying to fix the targets understanding of the query strings, you can mask the query strings when you create the hyperlink in your email marketing tool.
Just put the anchor identifier “#” at the end your link url. By that way the recipients web browser interprets the query string as an anchor within the target website. As there is no anchor text with that name on the target website, it has no effect. That’s in the specification of HTML since version 4.01 from 1999 – yes that was is in the last century.
You see how important it is to test your mailing with real recipients.
At the moment, everytime you reopen the editor the above setting is unchecked and it doesn’t work in the form.
Apart from that, only four freemail providers are offered to filter.
That’s why I took a look into the Javascripts of ClickDimensions and found and extended the original code for it.
The following code will override the original code to add an additional validation. You can add other or even more freemail providers to met your requirements. Just insert it in the CodeEditor of the forms designer.
// enable or disable the filter functionality
var filterFreemail = "true";
// customize the message provided to the user when a freemail address has been entered
var clickd_MSG_FREE_EMAIL = "We accept only business email addresses.";
// customize the array of blocked freemail providers to met your requirements
var blockedFreeEmail = ["hotmail.com", "gmail.com", "yahoo.com", "aol.com"];
// default ClickDimensions function, extended with our own validation
function FormValid()
{
var isValid = true,
isAllowed = true,
reqFieldList = clickd_jquery("input[name='reqField']", "#clickdimensionsForm");
for (var i = 0; i < reqFieldList.length; i++)
{
// default validation
isValid = ValidField(clickd_jquery(reqFieldList[i]));
if (!isValid)
{
break;
}
// custom validation
isAllowed = AllowedField(clickd_jquery(reqFieldList[i]));
if (!isAllowed)
{
isValid = false;
break;
}
}
return isValid;
}
// own validation, copied and modified from ClickDimensions original
function AllowedField(hidden)
{
var fieldType = hidden.attr("alt");
var fieldID = hidden.val();
var fieldString = "";
var field = clickd_jquery("#" + fieldID);
if (clickd_jquery("#cont_id_" + fieldID).attr("wasskipped") == "1")
{
return true;
}
var infoId = "required_info_" + fieldID;
infoId = infoId.replace("f_upload", "f");
var info = clickd_jquery("#" + infoId);
var infoText = clickd_jquery(info).text();
if (infoText != "")
{
Un_SelectNotValidInput(info, field);
}
if (fieldType.toLowerCase() == "email")
{
fieldString = clickd_jquery(field).val();
if (fieldString.length > 0)
{
fieldString = fieldString.replace(/\s+$/gm, '');
}
}
if (fieldType.toLowerCase() == "email" && fieldString.length > 0)
{
var domain = fieldString.split("@")[1].toLowerCase();
// set field invalid for freemail provider
if (filterFreemail.toLowerCase() == "true")
{
for (var i = 0; i < blockedFreeEmail.length; i++)
{
if (domain == blockedFreeEmail[i])
{
SelectNotValidInput(info, field, clickd_MSG_FREE_EMAIL);
return false;
}
}
}
}
return true;
}