automated email help

[reddevill57]

Hello,

I'm having A hard time with a plugin I purchased(AfFiler) that creates .PDF files & is supposed to automate the email process with attachments based on calculating the parameters. However i'm kind of stuck on some issues and was hoping for some guidance. Apperantly I'm supposed to have A local mail server. Which I don't, and I was hoping someone might suggest an easy to use, cheap simple program for this purpose. The plugin uses SMTP relay and it asks for the address of the SMTP server and what port to use. I downloaded what I thought was A "no-brainer" demo version of Local SMTP Relay Server and set it up according to instructions. No luck.

In the end what I want to do is have FileMaker go through A list of clients, using information from fields in each record and do the following.

Send to:

From:

Subject:

Attachment: c:/clientA.pdf

If anyone is familiar with this plugin and has A solution I'd love to hear from you. Or if theres another way to do this I'm all ears too.

Thanks in advance.

[Steve T.]

Hi, rd! You might be able to use your ISP's SMTP server for this... I think it's worth a try. Whatever SMTP you use for your regular e-mail account, try using that as the SMTP server setting for the plug-in. Some SMTP servers reject unauthenticated mail, but some don't... your ISP may just rely on IP address range checking so you might be okay.

If not, I hear SMTP on Windows can be less than straight forward... I think it involves configuring IIS. On Mac OS X machines, it's pretty easy, though, and I think it comes with Sendmail or PostFix pre-installed.

I could be mistaken, but I think a simple e-mail sending as you described can be done from FM's ScriptMaker without needing a plug-in. The ScriptMaker method just needs you to use a regular e-mail account and your regular e-mail client (there's an approved list, including Outlook, Eudora, etc.). Info is taken from your db for the fields, and I believe you can even include an attachment. The trickiest part of the process is composing the body text of the message using calculation fields and/or concatenations to get what you want. The only part I can think of that would cause problems would be the different attachments for the different parameters, but I suppose you could have different subscripts which each only execute when their specific parameters have been met... In other words, you could have scriptA, scriptB, scriptC, etc. and then just have the appropriate one execute depending upon the criteria.

--ST

[reddevill57]

Steve,

Thank you for the response. I appreciate you taking the time to help. While I was waiting for A response, I found A perfect plugin that does exactly what I was looking for. As long as you don't mind the "plug". Pardon the pun. It's called SMTPit. Very user friendly, well documented. Again thank you for the help.