Sending Emails from IWP?

[Cassetti]

I have a bit of an issue, not sure if anyone else has encountered it.

My boss wanted a way to be able to send emails and save the emails related to each contact from the road, and to allow our UK office to send emails from our database.

My solution was to create a Table of emails, and set the status to "unsent". Using ScriptFire Plugin, we have a server that runs a script every 5 minutes and looks for unsent emails, if found, it sends them using the EmailIt Plugin (both by Dacons)

Its quite an ingenious quick fix, but there's one problem:

ScriptFire does not run if there is a dialog box in Filemaker Open (such as communication lost with host server). Therefor our system has no checks and balance. I have an email that goes out every morning that lets me know the server is running, but that is not enough.

We tried using the "Open URL" Script step to send the data to the computer's mail client with mixed success using the "Mailto:[email protected]?subject="whatever"?body="blahblahblah""

However, this link system only allows two or three lines of body text at most.

Is there a better solution for sending emails from fmp web?

[Reed]

How about scheduling an OS-level script to launch filemaker: open a launcher file that opens the remote DB, sending you an email if server communication can't be established, run the "unsent check" script and the emailing script, then quit filemaker. This way FM won't remain open, and there won't be any dialog boxes for "lost communication" etc.

[Cassetti]

Interesting concept, however my script runs every few minutes, wouldn't that use up a lot of resources? You are talking about just setting up a scheduled event within windows 2000 right?

That may work, but what i'm more curious about, is if there is a way to bypass having to use a que system, and instead having some sort of system that has a CGI script or somethign hosted on our webserver that can authenticate and send emails. Has that been done?

[Reed]

You can certainly send emails from the server, but you can't do it that way with IWP. You have to use CWP.

If you have a dedicated machine just to run the email script, it doesn't really matter how many resources it takes. Also, you don't have to launch Filemaker each time, just leave it open. The script can open the file, which will have a startup script doing all the operations you want, and having the last step close the file.

You can also install a script scheduling plugin to do the checking on a schedule so everything will be done from within FM.

MMScript from CNS plugins

zippscript from zipptools (the only free one I know of)

Activator from Troi

Events from worqsmart

Each of these plugins vary in features/pricing/support but all of them can do basic scheduling.