Direct email

[Douglas Burghardt]

First a thank you to all the members who have provided answers to my many questions over the years. Guy Dombrowski - I love the graphic console and am busily rewriting some 900k lines of old code to a sparkling new app. And to fellow badger Michael Mattias for his uncanny insights. Usually I find an answer by just searching the forums and the internet, but not this time.

I want to send a simple email with an rtf attachment from my users all over the state to a single email account without using the users ISP or some third party program that would have to be installed on each user. This is either incredibly complex or incredibly easy. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated,
and again, thanks to all.

Doug Burghardt
Lake Country Systems, Inc.

[John Strasser]

Hi Douglas,

Well, by "not using their ISP" I'm assuming you mean the SMTP server on their ISP?

Just as I use COX at home, Cybertrails at the office and my email goes through the mail server on my domain at Life Transcendent (which is hosted and managed at simplenet)

The easiest way is to set up your own smtp server on another port. Then, so long as they are connected to the internet, you would connect to your server just the way you would normally and the email would go out.

Did I understand what you needed?

JS

[Douglas Burghardt]

Hi John,

Right, I'm trying to avoid using the customers mail server. The problem is that I use one of my email address' in the From field. Many isp mail servers frown on this and issue a "cannot forward error". There are local mail server programs available, but I don't want to have to install them on their system and risk causing problems in their regular email.

So, I was hoping their was a way I could open port 25 and send the email directly to the end users host email address and bypass the customers mail server completely. So far no luck.

Thanks for the repsonse,

Doug Burghardt
Lake Country Systems, Inc.

[Michael Mattias]

> And to fellow badger ....
>Lake Country Systems, Inc.

As a fellow Badger, I can guess from your business name you are probably somwhere in Waukesha County; the problem is, not everyone else is from this particular corner of America's Dairyland (California's bloviating notwithstanding) and has no clue.

Why don't you take the three minutes it will require to update your profile with a location?


MCM

[Michael Mattias]

>Right, I'm trying to avoid using the customers mail server

Not to put too fine a spin on this, but why would you agree to develop an email application for a user who does not want to use his mail server, or possibly just disguise the true point-of-origin of said email, or maybe try to cheat the ISP of fees due for excess use?

Hmmm.... does this rich text file you send have something to do with either Cialis or powered wheelchairs? (That's what I mostly get these days, anyway).

MCM

[John Petty]

deleted wrong answer

[John Petty]

Try again, if you want a large number to send in to a single address then you must go via their mail server or write a very complex program. If you set up your own mail server you would need to be very careful that it was not considered an open relay and quickly banned. There is a simple SMTP sample in your PB samples the to address would need to exist should exist on your server. If you also use that in the From as well then it would normally be considered as spam. Its a try and see job which will depend on the amount of spam checking done by your mail server.

[Douglas Burghardt]

Sorry it's nothing sinister. The attachment is a fax going to an email to fax service and I need my email address to keep track of the billing. Some isp's are just a PIA to deal with.

For what it's worth we're in Hartford, Wi but I doubt anyone gives a rip.

As I figured it's probably not worth the trouble, thanks anyway,

Doug Burghardt

[George Bleck]

I know as a matter of fact that at least McAfee blocks all port 25 traffic unless {application.exe} is registered in it's exception list. This is to help prevent zombified PC's from spambotting the world. Things like outlook.exe, netscape.exe, etc. are already premade exceptions so using them to send your mail via API's or COM interfaces might be your best bet still.

Otherwise, you will need to contend with explaining to clients how to create exceptions for your application for differing AV products.

[Michael Mattias]

The attachment is a fax going to an email to fax service and I need my email address to keep track of the billing. Some

Why don't you just cc or bcc yourself, using the "real" email address for the sender?

How are you sending the mail? Driect via TCP statements? using MAPI interface? Regardless I am sure there are "CC" and/or "BCC" code samples here somewhere.

I think I am missing something in the application design, unless you are acting kind of like a service bureau and charging the "real" sender for doing the sending....????

BTW, some people do "give a rip" about where you are. Hartford huh... the former and maybe current home of The Wacker Corp and Dorner Manufacturing Co, to whom we sold a lot of stuff when I was with Mainline.

MCM

[Douglas Burghardt]

Hi Michael,

Actually the fax service needs to see my email address in the from, and we do the billing for all the users as a service so they don't each have to set up their own accounts. It's a minor problem since this requirement goes away by law in about 6 months, so I'm not going to spend any more time on it. Too much else to do. I was just hoping there would be an easy solution.

Thanks for the response,
Doug Burghardt

[Mike Doty]

I want to send a simple email with an rtf attachment from my users all over the state to a single email account without using the users ISP or some third party program that would have to be installed on each user. This is either incredibly complex or incredibly easy. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated,
and again, thanks to all.

Client upload:
TCP SEND (YourServer$, Port&,Document$)

Your server:
TCP RECV(Port, Document$)
PBEmail (Document$, ToAddress$)

PBEmail is by Don Dickinson at http://www.greatwebdivide.com

[Knuth Konrad]

Two comments:

a) An application connecting an outside resource "under the hood" (i.e. without notifying the user and/or the user did pick this option somewhere) is really bad practice. And a lot of malware & virus scanner/firewalls will raise an alarm for your application.

b) In general, circumventing a proper MTA will also result in your mails being marked as spam, as they appear to be spoofed to the receiving mail server/spam checker. This does not apply in this case, as you're sending to yourself (except your ISP does some spam checking you're not aware of)

[Mike Doty]

Does this mean forward the emails for the users or get the emails?
Not sure what not use ISP means. Does this mean do not use any mail servers?
If just receiving the emails then TCP or FTP documents to a server and cut email out of the loop.

Having never maintained a mail server, can email be sent directly to your own email server on ports other than 25/110?

[Kev Peel]

If you have a server with CGI support then it's (fairly) trivial to call this CGI from your program and pass information to it. I do it all the time for things like product update requests and GPF reports (from an exception handler), the program running on the client's computer will call the CGI using PB's TCP statements or even SHELL.

Of course they (the client) must be informed of this communication before the product is installed.

[John Petty]

If you run your own mail server and your clients have static IP's (probably a big ask) then you can safely set your mail server to relay emails from those IP's sending using your domain name to the fax people.

[Mike Doty]

Did you consider not using email?