Sending mail (invisibly) from inside a Mac LC app

[Ben Rubinstein]

I'm still surprised that your original approach of doing SMTP directly from 
inside LC wasn't sucessful.

I have an app that does data transformation jobs on a regularly scheduled 
basis, and sends reports via email.  I coded it many years ago, basing this 
part on Shao Shen's libSMTP; with simple configuration options for SMTP 
server, port, auth type, username and password; and since then it's been 
deployed by a number of different clients, and we've always been able to 
configure it successfully to work with the mail server in their environment.

For home users, maybe you could use AppleScript to extract the configuration 
from their Mail app at startup, and if necessary ask them to confirm the 
details (you probably have to ask them to confirm the password even in the 
best case); for corporate users getting the details of their mail server may 
have to be part of the (one time for the organisation) configuration.  But 
once you have the configuration, taking this approach feels more robust, since 
it doesn't require using AppleScript to work with a third-party piece of 
software which may change outside your control (Apple are rubbish at 
implementing their own technology, including AppleScript, consistently) and 
may not always be installed.

(On my own Mac for example, Mail is always there, because it's not worth the 
trouble to deinstall it; but I've never used it in all the years since moving 
to OS X. (I used to be an Outlook/Entourage user, then I switched to 
Thunderbird). So your software would launch Mail, which would then appear and 
ask me to configure it, I'd decline.... etc.)

My $0.02

Ben