Problem
Applications that integrate with MailUp may wish to request new MailUp trial accounts if the user of the application is not yet a MailUp user.
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Free trial account Account activation via API is an advanced feature that is disabled by default. It requires manual activation by the MailUp team. Please contact MailUp to have this feature enabled for your application. |
Solution
You can build the ability to activate a new MailUp trial account right into your application by using the MailUp public API endpoint. Below you can find the expected workflow and the technical details for implementing it. An example of application using the MailUp account provisioning API is the Odin one. Below we describe how to activate a free trial account, but the same methods can be used - upon request - to provide custom setups (ie whitelabel platform with custom features enabled).
Workflow
- The external application requests account activation using TrialActivation method and specifying an email address that has already been confirmed (i.e. there is no need of an additional email that confirms that email address is valid)
- Activation starts and TrialActivationStatus method can be used to get activation status. When activation is in progress, TrialActivationStatus returns a value that is different than 2. While status is different than 2 the external application is not yet able to connect to the console account, the following strings could be displayed:
- Value = 3,4 or 6 => “An error happened, the activation will be managed directly by MailUp support”. This result rarely happened during maintenance activities, in which processing was suspended for about 2 hours and then restarted.
- Value = 5 or 7 => ”The trial activation is in progress, you’ll receive the account credential soon.”
- When activation is completed you’ll receive MailUp account credentials in your inbox and, at the same time, TrialActivationStatus returns 2.
- At this point the MailUp account is available and received credentials can be inserted into the external application to perform authentication on the newly activated account
Different authentication & authorization
Access to the resources (lists, messages, subscribers) of the newly activated account requires an authentication and authorization process that is different than the one used for the /wiki/spaces/mailupapi/pages/36340648: specifically, it requires OAuth2 authentication with a token that has to be periodically refreshed when HTTP 401 error is returned. Please refer to "Samples and Wrappers" if you need a working example of an application that properly uses refresh token to access to MailUp resources. See more information about /wiki/spaces/mailupapi/pages/36340656.
Getting Started
- Activate a developer console at http://developers.mailup.com/setupen
- Setup a new application from the freshly activated developer console (http://help.mailup.com/display/mailupapi/Getting+started)
- Take contact with Mail Up Support ( support@mailup.com ) to log a request for application authorization. ( please provide a description of the application, its name and related clientID )
How to activate a trial account
- POST callback URL: https://services.mailup.com/API/v1.1/Rest/PublicService.svc/Console/TrialActivation
- Arguments :
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No more than one trial activation is allowed from the same caller IP. In order to facilitate the development and to avoid the creation of unused accounts, developers can take advantage of the "fake activation" feature, which can be used when IpAddress = 127.0.0.1 or when IpAddress starts with "192.168.". "Fake activation" does not actually create a new account and it returns "-1" as activation request code. In addition, in case of "fake activation", a random value1 is returned when calling TrialActivationStatus (1) returned values have range that spans from 1 to 7 and they can be used to simulate real cases. Due to an API limitation, also "0 - Not Confirmed" may be returned in case of fake activation, please manage this case exactly as "1 - Confirmed" |
Relevant notes
- Creating a new account may take up to a couple of minutes. When completed, the activation process will take care of sending activation confirmation message and login credentials to the applicant’s defined email address
- Login credentials can be only transmitted by email as there’s no API method that can return those values.
- Currently there’s no implemented functionality in the MailUp API set to retrieve the list of activated consoles from a certain application. This ability is planned to be implemented in the near future.
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