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Lesson 9: Send e-mails from your script! |
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Lesson 9: Send e-mails from your script!
Summary:
Learn to use JMail to send emails from your ASP scripts.
Intro:
To send e-mail from your scripts are an extremely useful feature.
I use this for five purposes:
1) Send the content of a submitted form to my email address.
A good idea if you don't have a db to store the info in.
2) Send mail to a user when he registers for something, this
can help me verify that the email address is correct, and
I can welcome him as a new user etc.
3) If I got a password protected site, I can make a button that
sends the password to the user if he has forgotten it.
4) Let the user mail others. E.g. a "Tell a friend" script.
5) The fifth and incredibly cool purpose is error reporting. Let's say that you
sell a product, and you got a order form for it. But something's wrong,
so all the users get an error message. The users are angry that they
can't make the order, and will probably not bother to send you a mail
telling you about it. The result is that you get no sales.
I have made a function that if a critical page generates an error message, this
message is mailed directly to me. Then I can fix the error, and my
users are happy.
What do I need?
You need two things. A mail component and a mail server.
Let's start with the mail component. I recommend JMail because
it's free, and it's simply the best free email component out there.
(It won a test on 15Seconds). You have to fill out a short form to
download it, but that's a cheap price to pay for this great software.
So download it now: Jmail download site
If you got hosting on Softcom, you
got JMail preinstalled!
You can use any kind of mail server that you have access to.
Let's start on the code:
Page 1, the form: form.asp
<HTML>
<BODY>
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="jmail.asp">
Your email address: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="MailTo"><BR>
The subject: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="subject"><BR>
Your message: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="body"><BR>
<INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Send mail">
</FORM>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Page 2, the mail script and confirmation page: jmail.asp
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Confirmation </TITLE>
<BODY>
<%
Set JMail = Server.CreateObject("JMail.SMTPMail")
' This is my local SMTP server
JMail.ServerAddress = "mail.yourdomain.com:25"
' This is me....
JMail.Sender = "myemail@mydomain.net"
JMail.Subject = Request.Form("Subject")
' Get the recipients mailbox from a form (note the lack of an equal sign).
JMail.AddRecipient Request.Form("MailTo")
' The body property is both read and write.
' If you want to append text to the body you can
' use JMail.Body = JMail.Body & "Hello world!"
' or you can use JMail.AppendText "Hello World!"
' which in many cases is easier to use.
JMail.Body = Request.Form("body")
' 1 - highest priority (Urgent)
' 3 - normal
' 5 - lowest
JMail.Priority = 3
'JMail.AddHeader "Originating-IP",
'Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR")
' Must make sure that IUSR_???? has access to the following files.
' I've disabled the attachments and footer in this demo
'JMail.AppendBodyFromFile "e:\mail\standard_footer.txt"
'JMail.AddAttachment "e:\products\MyProduct.exe"
JMail.Execute
%>
<CENTER>
An e-mail has been sent to your mailbox (<%=request.form("MailTo")%>).
</CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Download the code: lesson9.zip
There are a lot of email components out there and most of them
work roughly the same way as JMail. You usually find a sample ASP
script using the component on the component creator's website.
Hope this could help you get starting! Good luck!
Where to go next:
Take a look at our lessons page
to get an overview of all our lessons.
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