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E-Mail Signatures

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Posted on by CU19061021-0 7
Hi Forum!
 
Am new to Dynamics CRM (2016 Build 8.2.28.11) and currently trying to customize it according to our requirements. We plan to use it to convert support mails to cases and sales mails to leads and then work on a lead/case basis instead of working with emails.
 
In the past we used Outlook signatures, offering 3 different formats for each signature: Text, RTF and HTML.

Our signatures use embedded images to prevent additional HTML connections when someone reads the mail.

It seems this embedded information is lost and I am forced to use regular links and have the images hosted somewhere, for example on our web server.
 
Is there a better solution than having to do that and somehow keep the embedded image?
 
Is it OK to drop Text and RTF? Most emails these days seem to be HTML. Is anyone still enforcing Text out there?

Or would it make more sense to stay with the Outlook client and get the Outlook CRM Add-on working for email communication? But then two tools would need to be used slowing the support process down.
 
I would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Best regards,
Andreas
  • CU19061021-0 Profile Picture
    CU19061021-0 7 on at
    E-Mail Signatures
    Thank you Ray for your suggestions.
     
    I had some success with it, while making me realize where the limits of this old Dynamics version are.
     
    First I had to fix our Exchange. It was for some reason sending mails from 3rd party apps like Dynamics as text encoded only, while Outlook worked properly so we were not aware of this setting.

    Had to use this command in Exchange Management shell to see it:
    Get-RemoteDomain | fl
     
    It said this for the "*" domain representing any (external) domain, among many other settings:
    ...
    ContentType                          : MimeText
    ...
     
    So I had to run this to force it to send both Text and HTML as expected by most email clients to give the user a choice:
    Set-RemoteDomain -Identity * -ContentType MimeHtmlText
     
    or to send HTML only:
    Set-RemoteDomain -Identity * -ContentType MimeHtml
     
    Before that, all outgoing mails from 3rd party apps were text encoded only.
     
    With the help of your suggestion I was then able to create a few test mails copying the signature first (from Outlook) and then additionally copying the images having the src set to a base64 encoded data chunk of the PNG image.

    I sent the same email from outlook.

    Outlook is then taking the img and converts it into an attachment, which Yahoo then displays correctly.

    If I send it through Dynamics, this conversion does not happen and unfortunately Yahoo does not display the image at all (even though it is in the technically correct HTML). Here is a brief description of how it should be done (just like Outlook already does it): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9110091/base64-encoded-images-in-email-signatures. If changing the image source to a hosted image this would probably work, which I have seen in other community postings. But this would get intercepted by many security solutions because it is like a tracking cookie and it is possible for the sender to see (if not blocked) who opened the email (if using a unique image URL) and from where it was opened and eventually more information like browser used and so on.

    Another bad thing I noticed was that there is no ability to copy & paste into a Dynamics Mail and resize the image. It always stays at its original size. We insert screenshots or images of dialogs a lot during our work. I don't think it makes any sense to further look into 8.2 unless I could get the Outlook CRM Client working and then use Outlook like before.

    Instead I have now setup a Dynamics 9.2 Azure installation to check out what it can do. Most likely many of these issues have been addressed already in 9.x.

    Thanks again.

    Best regards,
    Andreas
     
  • Ray Profile Picture
    Ray 1,406 on at
    E-Mail Signatures
    Did you tried to add the image into email body and send out, then copy the content into the signature?  I think you may find some info by comparing the signareture content(html) and email body content(html).
    Also in the email client app, it may need to extra configurs to show the images, like "Automatic Download Settings" in Outlook.
  • CU19061021-0 Profile Picture
    CU19061021-0 7 on at
    E-Mail Signatures
    Newer Dynamics versions seem to work better with embedded images.
     
    I tried a lot of things, even using an img tag having the image embedded using inline css like this:
    <img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0....MoreBase64xHvbc==" alt="Company Logo">

    It gets replaced by our alt text.

    Unfortunately we are stuck on that version, so I will probably try to treat the outcome as a token and replace it on the mail server with this inline version. Our mail server has some feature for that (postfix). Exchange could potentially do the same if writing an event sink DLL hooking into the mail process.
     
    Best regards,
    Andreas

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