Re: Email Connectivity

dekardsdesigns_at_btinternet.com wrote:
> I have looked at HTML BD and it looks just the technology I would like
> to use, although it does look so user freindly I wonder how much
> control the developer has over the actual pages and unique designs and
> buiolding of them.

I have done some pretty complex stuff in HTMLDB - and it is also being used by people with 0% expertise and knowledge about web architecture. It covers the skills spectrum nicely.

> I am a little unclear with your commments regarding.....
<snipped>

As another poster already responded - you can emulate what HotMail and Yahoo Mail and others are doing, by creating a web-based mail client. This allows you to read and send e-mail. The send e-mail part can be done using Oracle's UTL_MAIL.

The only "complex" piece that you will need code or integrate is getting e-mail into Oracle. Oracle as an e-mail client (sending e-mail) is easy. Oracle as an e-mail server (receiving e-mail) is more difficult as Oracle does not provide a SMTP server interface. UTL_MAIL provides the client-side SMTP interface.

Seeing that this is just a project, you should try and make this part as easy as possible too. E.g. state that this project only allows e-mails to be send to other e-mail users in Oracle database. Thus a "Send E-Mail" function will simply insert a row into the sender's outbox table and insert the same row into the receiver's inbox table. No need for SMTP or POP3 - these are afterall RFC'ed and "known" and can be implemented. Your project implementing it in Oracle will not really prove anything, except that you can code.

Or you can go that route and look at the integration option with SMTP servers, loading a Java Open Source one into Oracle itself, and so on.

--
Billy