Sending an email message from within MetaCard

[John Kiltinen]

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.

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?

John Kiltinen


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 John Kiltinen (kiltinen at nmu.edu)        Home              Office
 Professor, Dept. of Math. & CS   Tel.(906) 228-8035 or (906) 227-1600
 Northern Michigan University     Fax (906) 228-4667 or (906) 2272010
 Marquette, MI 49855 USA
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