Configuration Manager

Mail handler

This section describes the additional configuration parameters when you plan to use the Mail plugin.

Select Mail in the connection type listbox when defining the database connection. Your screen will look like:

• Mail software: Two possible selections:
• Internal or Internal authenticated: this is the PRODBX internal mailing program. It doesn't need any other mailing software or special drivers to be installed on your machine. Please remind you need to define the other parameters in this accurately. Authenticated means that the SMTP needs authentication. This is the same as Mailbox username and password.
• Outlook: selecting this option, the connection client will use the MAPI spooler of the Microsoft Outlook installed on the machine the client is running on. It will use all settings of the user currently logged in on that machine.
• Incoming POP3: the POP3 address where your mailbox is located. Only for incoming mail. This parameter is only relevant when 'Internal' mail was selected.
• Outgoing SMTP: the SMTP address of your internet provider to send mail. Only for outgoing mail. This parameter is only relevant when 'Internal' mail was selected.
• Mailbox username: the username to access the POP3 mailbox.
• Mailbox password: the password to access the POP3 mailbox.
• Display name: the 'From' name you want to appear in the message when you send mail.
• Attachment filter: a list of file extensions you accept of the incoming mail. Per default, attachments are saved on the disk, or send as transaction. This means any attachment to the mail is handled, except when you define a filter in this parameter. File extensions are separated by a semicolon (;), and entered in uppercase. The file extensions of the attachments are converted to uppercase before comparing them with the list of attachment filters.
• Write attachment directly: when enabled, the attachment is directly written on the disk where the connection client is running on. If disabled, the file will be converted to a hexadecimal stream to be sent as transaction. The transaction can only be decoded by a connection client filehandler.
• Attachment directory: full path of the directory where the attachments may be written. This field is only valid when the previous field was enabled.

Remark: you can not send mail with attachments, only receive attachments.

The mail message can be interpreted as a small database. In order to do the rest of the configuration you must treat messages as database tables with database fields. Names for these tables and columns are fixed.

MESSAGE

• MessageId: unique identifier of the message
• ReceivedAt: date and timestamp the message was received (local format)
• SentAt: date and timestamp the message was sent (local format)
• From: the name of the sender
• To: name or email address to send the message to
• EmailAddress: the email address of the sender
• Subject: the subject line in the message
• Body: the message itself.

To successfully send a message you need to define at least 'To' which is the email-address of the person sending the mail to. 'From' and 'EmailAddress' are the name and email-address of the sender. If you don't specify a value in the 'Tables and Mappings' section PRODBX will default this to the machine name and 'unknown@prodbx.com'. Although you don't get an error, your SMTP provider might have difficulties with the non-existent domain name, as well as the POP3 provider of the receiver who might reject the message for spam protection reasons.

ATTACHMENT

• MessageId: unique identifier of the message
• AttachmentId: unique identifier of the attachment
• Filename: filename, including file extension of the attachment
• BytesRead: number of bytes in the file for which transactions are sent. When writing directly to the disk, this field is not used.
• TransactionNumber: number of transactions being built out of the attachement.

FILE

• MessageId: unique identifier of the message
• AttachmentId: unique identifier of the attachment
• BlockId: Sequencenumber of the block in the transaction
• Block: data from the file. This is a part of the file identified by the BlockId.
• Filename

When files are not written to the disk directly, they are send to another PRODBX connection client. This client is then a 'FileHandler'. To send information to another client, it needs to be transacted = making transactions from the file. Therefore the file is cut into a number of blocks. Each block contains a part of the file. Since transactions can be sent through XML, and XML does not support non-ANSI characters, we would have a problem transporting these non-ANSI characters. Therefore, the blocks are converted into the hexadecimal representation of the individual bytes.

Outlook Remark: starting from Office2000 SP1, you will have difficulties in using Outlook. Outlook will come up with all kind of messages. You cannot disable these messages, unless you use Microsoft Exchange server. See documentation of Microsoft Exchange.