Confirmation by e-mail

What is confirmation by e-mail used for?

When registering, most services ask you to follow the link sent to you by e-mail. ZennoPoster has a special e-mail confirmation system.

How to set up email confirmation

During the project recording, when the service asks you to confirm the registration by e-mail, click on the Process email button, the action will be automatically recorded in the template, and a window will open in which you can step by step configure the work with mail.

Step one

Enter your username and password from your mailbox. Usually parameters such as server, port, protocol, etc. are determined automatically. But, you may have to enter them manually. This is done as usual when connecting the mailbox to the mail program. When entering your mailbox, you can configure the use of a proxy. Remember, the mailbox must contain at least one message, which can be used to create a mail processing action.

Step two

After filling in the data and successfully logging into the mailbox, click Next . A second form will open.

1. Choose whether you want to delete downloaded emails.

2. Specify a timeout. The letter from the service may not arrive immediately, so you can specify one or more timeouts, after which the search will be performed. Several timeouts must be specified with ";" then, if after the first timeout the letter is not found, the system will wait a second time for the time specified in the second timeout, and so until the letter is found or the timeouts run out. Timeouts are specified in seconds.

3. Specify the number of emails downloaded from the directory.

4. Specify Imap directories. Downloading of letters occurs from the selected folders. If the field is empty, then the action works as before, downloading mail from the Inbox and Spam folders.

5. Click the Download letters button to see what letters you have in your mailbox.

6. Select the type of text - you can parse the original Text, or the rendered HTML, whichever is more convenient in your particular case. Letter headers are also included in this text.

7. Select a regular expression to search for the desired letter in the field below. A little more detail on this field. Let's say you register many different resources, many accounts on each. You have many different letters in your mail. To set up confirmation, you only need to accurately identify one letter that was sent now. You can distinguish letters from different services by the domain, which is almost always found in the confirmation links of the letter. You can distinguish letters from the same service by reference. Usually they write "Thank you for registering, your_login" exactly your_login will be different in different cases of registration. Sometimes you can use not your_login, but mail in the "to" field, it is also unique for each registration.

8. Considering all this, you need to choose a regular expression from those offered in this field, or compose it yourself. Please note that our regular expressions use macros. These macros must have the correct values, which is only possible when recording a project. When editing a project, you will have to skip this step and check the correctness of the regular expression already when debugging the project.

9. Choose whether you want to delete the letter after confirmation from ZennoPoster and from the mail server.

If everything is set up correctly, click Search for mail to test your regular expression. If you specify a regular expression that matches several letters at once, they will be highlighted in red, which means that you need to change the regular expression to search for a letter. If the letter is highlighted in green, it means that you have correctly selected the search criteria, click Next (at least, taking into account the letters that are now in the mailbox).

Step three

After clicking Next , the third form for configuring confirmation by e-mail will open. In the upper part of the window you can see various variants of the text contained in your letter that you may need. For example, an activation link or an e-mail address. If among the proposed options there is a desired one, specify the variable in which to put the result in order to use it in the future. You can specify several variables if you need to take several texts. If the desired option is not among the proposed options, you can create your own regular expression to search for text. Clicking on the link Here is not what I need ... You will be taken to the regular expression constructor , where you can choose the search terms. When you finish writing the regular expression, click OK , another regex you created will appear in the list, do not forget to specify the name of the variable where to put the result. In a brief form of mail settings, all variables (if there are several of them when processing one letter) are not visible. And you can see them in all variables (F2) (or in advanced mail settings ). Remember, the email confirmation action does not go to the registration confirmation URL itself, it only looks for it in the body of the email. Then you need to take the link (from the variable ) and go to it in another action.