Hi there,
I’ve been using the Sendgrid node to send email alerts and recently I’ve noticed that the URLs in the links are broken.
I have made a test workflow to replicate the problem:
What happens when you actually click the link? Are you redirected to the expected page or are you dropped on a 404 somewhere? If the latter, can you provide the link that the browser ultimately resolves to?
My theory is that this is just Sendgrid’s Click Tracking feature; they replace the href of all <a> tags in your emails with something pointing back to their servers so that the traffic hits them first (where the click is tracked) and then the user is forwarded on to the actual URL. This is pretty common for email delivery services.
Hi @Dylan_Schuster, thanks for your answer, the actual link dropped me on a 404 on our marketing website.
Below is the transformed link:
http://url2451.unknotsolutions.com/ls/click?upn=-2B-2FEIBf-2BG4cWzvH5O481cheZ5QCrLGqZov-2BNu5RQEz1DnpFOVM3BWhJKDom1nlEyMnpljtEcmnNojecisZq-2FQ-2Fqd5-2Bjvl8jmaUmbAwLIj-2BTI-3DmF-K_3TDZvkpUOLy7dHC4WdlkqqLIs-2FRQDXAAlwyn8xpYKGc1qbGtXTZOiJfs31YrTfJT-2BjEIwj9KW131GPO-2FaukqxCuvL4LzijB94YeRjkBGTK3mTA547Qy4AIlLcVxkGBYvmWZEHmvoaCsxkqGlaQcrBqSziMlv7dV35heXvXrj3iVTUUk7NXOFgluFedehwAX9Ns-2B4wqw6FXKeYo8g0-2FUtW5qfTm3Z1L2pMp7A51UdHeA-3D
I’ve visited the link five times now and have gotten three different results:
I still think the issue is somewhere in your SendGrid configuration; Losant is not changing the email body you submit to SendGrid.
Not having access to your SendGrid account, the next thing I would try is disabling tracking for your link. From their documentation:
Click tracking can be turned off for individual links by including the
clicktracking=offattribute inside the anchor of an HTML link before thehref. For example,<a clicktracking=off href="http://example.com">link text</a>would not be tracked.
If SendGrid does not replace your URL with the one you’re getting in your inbox with that attribute in place, then that would be the smoking gun that the issue is in their click tracking / your domain configuration.
Thanks @Dylan_Schuster, I have disabled the tracking as instructed and it works.
Next step I guess is to understand why this worked before and doesn’t anymore?
Do you think this is purely on SendGrid’s hand?
Cheers
Jules
I feel strongly about that, yes. Losant runs your email body through the templating engine, rendering {{handlebars.helpers}} against values from your workflow payload, and we take that resulting string and pass it straight through to SendGrid. Behind the scenes we’re using their own client library to get the request over to them.
