In the next month we will be going live on our first application to make use of Image to email documents (PDF) to clients via SMTP.

I would be interested to know of any pitfalls or general advice the community would like to offer.

I am more concerned with "proving" to our interal clients that documents have indeed been sent. Of course there maybe other issues we have not thought about that may crop up so please feel free to add to this post.

Many Thanks

Hello,

When setting up a 'Send Email' or a 'PlanetPress Image' output using SMTP, the first thing to consider are the rules of the SMTP server itself(maximum size, etc), which of course cannot be bypassed by the PlanetPress Watch process.
With the SMTP protocol, the main issue is the fact emails which have not been sent are not returned or stored anywhere, so it is much more difficult to monitor success or failure and react accordingly. The PlanetPress Image log files indicate if generating the PDF was succesful, while the PlanetPress Watch log files report the parsed addresses and if the message was sent to the SMTP server or not : only the SMTP server logs will indicate whether or not the email was actually sent, and why in case of failure.

Thanks,

Pierre P

Hi John.

In my experience using a SMTP account, the trick is to Bcc the messages to one of your own accounts. This is a good proof that the messages have been sent. If Image sends a message but it was undeliverable, you will get a "Undeliverable" message back from System Administrator to the reply address of the SMTP account. If the Image output cannot send th e-mail, you can use the "On Error - Send to a process" facility to send the job file to the error bin input of another process that perhaps uses the simple send-email action to send the job file to an administrator address.

I think this should cover most situations.

Good luck.

Adrian

Hi John,

Some other stuff occured to me.

If you select the PlanetPress Image applet from the Control Panel, you can not only send a daily log of all activity to yourself but also deal with any e-mail addresses that were not resolved by sending yourself the file.

I suggest you try-out these facilities to see if they suit your needs.

In summary then: you Bcc the messages to yourself so you know which ones were sent. You look in the SMTP account in box for "Undeliverables" and you get sent a daily log and attached files where the address was not resolved. This should pretty much cover it.

Regards,

Adrian