Re: IBM i SMTP email service

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

In regard to your idea about building an IBM i application that sends mail
through the IBM i SMTP service, that's what we did in our student
information system:

https://imgur.com/a/zNRfJ

It sends messages to any number of recipients.





On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 9:11 AM, Mike Cunningham <mike.cunningham@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

> All good questions. Right now we are exploring options. We have some
> office that send out thousands of emails in adhoc requests. Last one was
> near 5,000. (We have about 5,500 students). Up until a month ago we had on
> site Exchange. In December we changed to Office 365 (many advantages for
> higher ed outside just email services). Discovered after that change that
> O365 limits the "TO" box to 500 emails. So in the past a user could
> cut/paste their entire 5,000 address list and send. Now they have to select
> 500 at a time and send multiple times. Process killer? No, not in my
> opinion, but there is sufficient push back from these offices to find ways
> to make it better.  So one alternative was to use the IBM I SMTP server to
> send these mass emails by letting the user who needs to do this connect and
> send as many as needed. (p.s. not my favorite alternative but it is a
> possibility). Another avenue we are exploring is a listserv what lets
> someone import a list of emails before sending and then sending to the
> list. Could be some room for error here if they load the list today with
> 1,000 and send their email, then next week load 2,000 without first purging
> the original list. Emails could go to the wrong group. My favorite option
> is we build a way for them to upload their list (csv), we clear and then
> populate a database table and link that table to the listsserv, or even
> just use the API calls to send the emails from the i. Right now I don't
> know the complexity of the content of the emails sent which might make that
> a limitation. HTML email with links and images and multiple attachments. I
> don't think we could replicate the capabilities of Outlook when composing
> an email.