Send External Email without Outlook or Exchange

I need to be able to send workflow messages to an external email address (for example, Google's Gmail), but we do not have MS Outlook or Exchange. I have tried B0200900 and B0500190 but they both rely on an Exchange profile. I have no way of creating a compliant profile. I have tried several options in the JDE.INI file but cannot seem to find a way to simulate an SMTP server without actually having one in my domain.

Any suggestions?

You want to be able to send email without actually having an email server, is this correct? Or, so you have an email server, it's just not exchange???

The only thing I can think of is to install an SMTP package on a server... There is a free one available at:

http://www.softstack.com/freesmtp.html

I'm sure there are others available.

This one really caught my interest... After some research, it looks like you can configure STMP directly on a windows server, no need to have exchange....

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308161

Yup - just how the spammers do it !

You might also look for command line utilities to do this - I personally use "GBMAIL.EXE" which uses a number of variables at a DOS command line. SENDMAIL on unix works well too. The idea would be that you create a program that makes external calls to do this.

Thanks for the info. I'm not sure that we'll have a license for IIS once we drop Exchange and Outlook - I'll check with my network techies.

I have also done some research into workarounds. I'm leaning toward a batch solution. I've looked into 2 of them - a freebie by Virdi and a more robust one from Febooti which should cost only about $100 per server.

I'll create some Windows text files via B34A1010 - one with the required batch parameters and a second to be launched by the Run Executable system function.

I believe it should work, but of course I give up some of the ease of use of an email package, especially the creation of groups of recipients using a single address.

If anyone has a more elegant solution, I'd love to consider it.

Thanks again for your input!

we use a proc called "xp_smtp_sendmail" as a replacement for xp_sendmail. It sends directly to an SMTP server. Where I work, it happens to be an Exchange server, but it could easily be any other SMTP-capbable server like Sendmail.

It is of course up to you to make sure your STMP server is not open for the world to use (aka "open relay"). And changing the port from 25 does not count.