sending email to bcc

[shays]

I am working on a script that will send to a large list of email addresses and I want to mask the addresses from recipients. When sending email from Eudora Pro, I just enter all addresses in the Bcc field. However, the Filemaker Pro script function doesn't seem to allow me to automatically send a list of addresses to Eudora Pro's Bcc field. Does anyone know of any fairly basic work arounds to this?

Thanks,

Todd Shays

[Chuck]

You can use the Open URL command and use the ?bcc= tag. See http://www.fmforums.com/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000001.html for more information.

Chuck

[shays]

Chuck,

Thanks. I've managed to make this work with sending the email address of the current record to the Bcc field. How do I make this happen with a found set of records? The built-in email function in FM Pro allows me to select the current record or the found set of email addresses. My intention is to be able to email to a block of addresses while masking the list using the Bcc field.

Thanks again for the help.

Todd

[This message has been edited by shays (edited January 03, 2001).]

[Chuck]

Compile the list of email addresses, separated by commas, into a global text field by looping through the found set, and use the global text field as the argument for the "?bcc=" & gEmail_Address portion of the calc.

Chuck

[shays]

I'm not very familiar with global fields and looping within scripts. I set-up the global field and then set-up the script as follows:

Perform Find {Request 1: email *@*}

{Restore find requests}

Loop

Set Field {email list, email & ", "}

Go to Record/Request/Page

{Next, Exit after last}

End Loop

Open URL {"bcc field"}

{No dialog}

The "bcc field" is a calculation as follows:

code:

---

"mailto:?bcc=" & email list

---

As, I'm sure is obvious, this keeps replacing the global field with an new email address followed by a comma. I have no idea how to append the list of email addresses into the global field, separating each address with a comma and leaving a comma off after the last address.

Thanks for your help!

Todd

[This message has been edited by shays (edited January 03, 2001).]

[Chuck]

Perform Find [ Restore ]

# Clear the global field

Set Field [ email list, "" ]

Go to Record/Request/Page [ First ]

Loop

[shays]

The script worked fine in terms of looping... and the global field ultimately contains all of the email addressess I need. The problem now, is that it only sends over exactly the first 200 characters into Eudora Pro. This is true whether I send to the "to:", "subject:" or "body:" of the email message using a "mailto:" URL.

I have looked around in the help, in these forums and on the Filemaker website and I can't find anything indicating that URLs have a maximum of 200 characters.

Incidentally, when I use the "Send Mail" script step instead of the "Open URL" step, all addresses get sent to Eudora - just not to the Bcc field since that's not a built-in option in the Filemaker Pro "Send Mail" function.

Any ideas??

Thanks,

Todd

[Chuck]

I believe that URLs have a limit of 256 characters. Could it be that the rest of the URL, with the email addresses, comes to 256 characters?

Also, if you have Eudora, you might consider using the Send Mail script step instead of the Open URL. Open URL is useful when you don't have an email client that works with Send Mail, but Eudora doesn't have this limitation.

Chuck

[shays]

Bummer! My whole intention was to send to a large list using the Bcc field to mask the addresses from other users.

Since OpenURL seems to have a small character limit, and Send Email doesn't directly feed the Bcc field, it looks like I won't be able to do this without a plugin or external script. Since my users are cross platform, I would have to write external scripts on Windows and Mac.

Can you think of any other more straight forward way to send about 150 email addresses to the Bcc field of Eudora (Mac) or Outlook (Windows) directly from Filemaker Pro?

Thanks again!

Todd

[Chuck]

Well, since it's automated by FileMaker, would there be a problem with sending multiple Open URL calls? For instance, let's say that you find that adding the next email address will take the length of the email beyond 256 characters. You send it without that last email address, and then begin compiling a new one, continuing until you've gone through all the email addresses. The only trouble with it is that the script is more complex, but once you have it running, it would do the job for you.

Other than that, try out one of the many plug-ins available for sending email from FileMaker. I've used MondoMail on the Mac side and can recommend it as a good tool.

Chuck