Sending an email message from within MetaCard

[andu]

--On Thursday, May 30, 2002 19:33:37 -0400 John Kiltinen <kiltinen at nmu.edu> 
wrote:

> Hello, MetaCard experts.
>
> I have been spending the day researching how I might be able to get a
> MetaCard application to send email messages.  These messages would all go
> to the same address, so the procedure does not need to be flexible.

If the address is known you can use the smtp server of that domain and 
overcome the main problem Scott is referring to bellow. The rest is just 
implementing the smtp protocol.

>
> Among the things I have found is a thread in the MetaCard discussion list
> archive from 21 September of 2000.  This was a posting from Scott Raney on
> one part of the problem (getting an smtp server address from the system or
> the default email client) of sending email from within MetaCard:
>
>> This problem seems intractable to me, at least until the OSs all have
>> a single standard way to store this type of information.  This is why
>> we explicitly don't support a "mail" or "open url with browser"
>> command, and why we strongly discourage people from trying to build
>> things like this into their stacks.  It's a technical support nightmare.
>
> Not terribly encouraging.  But MetaCard's stack "Survey.mc" that they have
> on their web site provides a model that might work for me.
>
> This stack allows one to fill out a survey form and then send the
> information to the MetaCard web server.  The MetaTalk command that is used
> is this:
>
>     post posttext to url "http://www.metacard.com/cgi-bin/survey.mt"
>
> Might this be an approach that would work in my case?  I would of course
> need to make arrangements on the web server side for some program there to
> forward the file posted as an email message.
>
> Has anyone implemented a system like this?  Is there a better way?  Can
> anyone point me to a model I could follow?

Survey.mt is a cgi script as you probably know. Since the servers I've been 
using were Linux, I use such a script to call Sendmail or similar to 
actually send the message.

> John Kiltinen
>
>
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Regards, Andu Novac