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This example shows how to send an automatic confirmation email after a customer has placed an order on an ecommerce website. The email will be generated by a custom web application or database. The email body should contain a header and footer, the customer's details, a list of items purchased, shipping costs and final price. A copy should also be sent to the accounts department for record. Using febooti Command line email tool helps greatly in sending automated email notifications.
Solution:
Once a purchase has been completed, the relevant application must generate the correct syntax and call febooti Command line email tool. Since the utility is a DOS prompt email client, it can be called from virtually any programming language or database that allows the execution of other programs from within a compiled application. The cited example focuses on producing a professional looking email as well as how to generate it.
* The command line email tool parameters are separated in to lines in the text below for ease of reading. The application should generate the command as one long string separated by white spaces.
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| febootimail -SERVER outgoing.mail.server.com
-FROM ""Ecommerce Website Online shop" <onlineshop@ecommerce-website.com>"
-TO ""John Doe" <john@customers-mailserver.com>"
-BCC accounts@ecommerce-website.com
-REPLYTO bounceback@ecommerce-website.com
-CHARSET ISO-8859-1
-SUBJECT Automatic receipt of your purchase with ecommerce-website.com
-MSG -USEFILE header.txt
-MSG %customer_name%, %customer_address%, %items_list%, %shipping%, %total%
-MSG -USEFILE footer.txt
-WAITBEFORE 2  |
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The following points explain what each parameter does when calling the febooti Command line email utility:
1: The first line makes a call to execute the command line email tool with the outgoing SMTP server defined. This argument can take a hostname or IP address.
2: The -FROM parameter tells the customer where the email is coming from. The quotes marks are necessary for this parameter. The syntax used in the example enables the customer to better understand the sender of the email by using a friendly name, rather than just an obscure email address.
3: The -TO parameter should include the customers name as well as their email address. This method will tell the customer's email client to display the customer's name than just a plain email address for more professionally looking results.
4: The -BCC field allows a blind a carbon copy of the generated email to be sent to an accounts department for record keeping purposes. This is particularly useful as the customer is unaware of such an email being sent.
5: The -REPLYTO parameter specifies what email address the customer's email client should use if the customer decides to reply to the email. Since this is an automatically generated email it may be a good idea to mention this to the customer in the body text.
6: The -CHARSET argument defines what character set the email client of the receiver should use. The Western character set has been mentioned in the example for convenience.
7: The -SUBJECT parameter defines the subject of the email.
8: The first -MSG allows the utility to use header text for the email stored in a text document.
9: The second -MSG contains the main body text of the confirmation email. The percentage marks are only representative of a string version of the given field. For example the %items_list% part of the argument may contain one or many items. It is up to the application to iterate through the list of items and add each subsequent item to the final generated string.
10: The last -MSG call in this example defines the use of pre-generated footer text to make the email look professional.
11: The final argument, -WAITBEFORE 2 specifies that the command line email tool will wait 2 seconds before actually attempting to send the email. This is useful for situations where many confirmation emails must be sent from large shopping portals. A small delay can reduce the chance of the outgoing mail server (SMTP) becoming overwhelmed with email requests.
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