auto email on a certain date?

[hamelekim]

My client wants an automatic email sent using a calculation based on a date + 1 week. They want the program to send this automatically, so no button is pressed. Is this even possible in Filemaker? The database would be hosted on a filemaker 8 server, on a windows server 2003 machine. Right now I am thinking this just isn't possible with filemaker.

[T-Square]

You could write a single script that was executed to send emails for all pending records. Said script would search for all records with a SendMail flag set, then, looping through the found set, it would send emails to each recipient in the record.

Triggering this script would either require some action on an administrator, or a special startup or shutdown script that tested for the day of week or something.

A big gotcha is that the Send Mail script step in Filemaker uses the Windows default email client, which Filemaker says has to be Outlook (I can confirm that Pegasus does NOT work!)--and the latest versions of Outlook hiccup (gag? barf?!?) when an outside program tries to send multiple messages in a very short period of time. Outlook thinks you're a spammer or a virus, and hangs the process up.

Others have reported using plug-ins such as SMTPit to manage mass emailings, for what it's worth.

David