cc or bcc with smtpsendmail

[matthiasR]

Hi,

are there any plans to include the possibility to send emails to cc or bcc recipients with smtpsendmail near future?

Regards,

Matthias

[jpuziano]

Hi Support,

I agree, enhancing the SMTPSendMail command to be able to include cc and/or bcc recipients would be nice, great suggestion matthiasR. As well, I noticed in the Help File, it says:

recipients : Include one or more email addresses, separated by semicolons

I have a macro that uses a dialog, you enter recipient email addresses, enter message text, hit a Send button and it sends the email using SMTPSendMail. I've noticed that if I separate multiple recipients with semicolons like it suggests in the help, it doesn't work, only the first recipient gets the email.

However when I use commas (,) instead, all recipients get the email so that's what I do. I'm just wondering if the documentation should be changed or is there something more going on here?

Thanks

[support]

Can't be commas, that doesn't make sense! Commas are delimiters between parameters so commas would just cause an error or failure. recipients is first parameter of SMTPSendMail command. If you have three recipients separated by commas SMTPSendMail will think first one is recipients, second is server and third is from_address. You sure your dialog isn't replacing the commas with semicolons?

Will look into adding CC/BCC.

[JRL]

I've been using SMTPSendMail for a couple of years sending to multiple addresses using commas as the delimiter between email addresses. I define a variable "recip" and put it in the SMTPSendMail line. I think that SMTP requires addresses to be delimited by commas, regardless of whether the email is sent from Macro Scheduler or any other email program.

I agree bcc and cc would be welcome additions. Also, a while back, someone mentioned sending HTML emails. That also would be nice.

Thanks for listening,
Dick

[jpuziano]

Hi Support,

I'm using variables for all SMTPSendMail parameters including recipients so embedded commas don't cause errors...

Let>recipients=[email protected],[email protected]
SMTPSendMail>recipients,server,me,myname,subject,body,attachment

To further test this, I removed the dialog and just left the bare minimum to send a test email. The only difference between tests is how the recipients string is built. Here's the results:

Let>recipients=[email protected],[email protected]
Comma with no space - Success, two emails sent

Let>recipients=[email protected], [email protected]
Comma with a space - Success, two emails sent

Let>recipients=[email protected];[email protected]
Semicolon with no space - Success, two emails sent

Let>recipients=[email protected]; [email protected]
Semicolon with a space - Failure, only first email sent
Success actually, but email came through late, delayed?

Update: When I got home, I checked the second email account again (Yahoo email) and found that all four tests did work... although the 4th one didn't show up right away (like the first three did).

I also noticed that even though the recipients string was different in each of the four tests, the To: field in Yahoo Email shows the two emails in the comma-space format like this:

To: [email protected], [email protected]

All four look exactly the same... is Yahoo enforcing this or is this a SMTPSendMail thing? I tried the same test just manually sending emails from the Yahoo and in all four cases, it converted the email separators to comma-space so I suppose Yahoo is doing this, but if they are, why? Is it "just for looks" to make all emails look similar or is it because comma-space is a more accepted email separator as far as Sendmail and SMTP goes? The following article seems to think so:

Separate Multiple Recipients Correctly (advocates comma)
http://email.about.com/cs/netiquettetips/a/et051101.htm

Using Google, I found 917 hits for:
"separate multiple recipients with a comma"

then again, there were 1,410 hits for:
"separate multiple recipients with a semicolon"

This article titled "VBScript does mail" says "Separate multiple recipients with a comma or semi-colon":
http://searchwinsystems.techtarget.com/ ... 43,00.html

RFC 821 - SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL -- is the standard
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0821.txt

...but in the RECIPIENT section, it doesn't stipulate a valid separator between multiple recipient email addresses, it just says this:

RECIPIENT (RCPT)

This command is used to identify an individual recipient of
the mail data; multiple recipients are specified by multiple
use of this command.

...so I suppose it is up to the software that talks to the SMTP server, to be able to parse a recipient string, separate individual emails and make multiple calls. I suppose any character/s not allowed as part of an email address would make good separators, comma and semicolon seem the most used. I found one article that said to use a space.

If anyone can shed more light here please do...

Many thanks to Support and all the knowledgeable contributors that make these forums well worth visiting.

[support]

Hi,

I have just checked the code and I can see that semicolons OR commas are acceptable in the recipients list. So you can use either. Of course if the recipients are hardcoded into the command then you need to use semicolons, but you can use commas if you like when using a variable.

We are adding SMTP_CCLIST and SMTP_BCCLIST variables to version 8.