Category Archives: EMail

Command Line Email

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Filed under EMail, Utilities

Every once in a while, I’ve run into the need to send an email via the command line. Often, this is during make scripts, or other long processing batch jobs. I’ve almost always ended up succumbing to “net send” and being done with it, but that’s not an option anymore with Vista. The good ol’ (and much maligned) Messenger service is no more under Vista and Server 2008.

So, I need to send an email via command line.

There’s piles of little email apps like this floating around, but most don’t support TLS, secure sockets or authenticated smtp access, which, for better or worse, is what GMail requires now.

After a good deal of searching, I ended up coming across the very nice (and free), MailSend utility by Muhammad A Muquit.

Sending email from the command line is a simple (albeit a tad long winded) command, all on one line of course:

mailsend -from you@gmail.com -to someone@domain.com +cc +bc -d gmail.com 
    -smtp smtp.gmail.com -v -starttls -auth-plain -user you@gmail.com -pass "yourpassword" 
    -sub "Test Subject" -M "This is the body of a test message"

Quite handy.

So I Printed Out all the Internets Yesterday….

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Filed under EMail, Rants

I was reading the latest ComputerWorld (Oct 29) and came across one of the best quotes I’ve seen in a while.

I’m not a huge fan of Grady Booch, but he has had quite the impact on IT. I just can’t stand UML.

At any rate, there’s an interview with him in this issue and at the end, he’s asked what has surprised him most in the last decade.

He responded:

“I haven’t seen any revolutions.Heck, I had my first email address in 1979. There was a printed document with everyone’s email address [in the world].”

Man, oh man, that’d be a sweet piece of tech memorabilia to hang on the wall.

Does that make me a geek<g>

VB and Lotus Notes

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Filed under EMail, Software Architecture

Not something that often ends up on a VB developer’s plate I suspect, but I had need to do some investigating of Lotus Notes and possible integration/extension development using VB (classic, v6.0, not .NET).

Come to find out, Notes does have COM support as of 5.0.2b, so appearently, you do not have to dive down into ever joyous C++ in order to take a stroll through Notes-ville. Unfortunately, finding actual documentation for that object model online feels like finding your kid’s matchbox car that fell out of their pocket in the ball pit at Chuck E Cheese. I’ll try to post my results, if any, when I have some.

Now, as to why you’d want to dig into Note, one look here should dissuade all but the foolhardiest of souls. Granted, I know very little of the internals of Notes. From what I understand, internally, it’s actually a quite capable system, and has been for years and years. Still, those screenshots speak volumes.

Me? Well, I have a foot and here’s a Smith and Wesson. With any luck, the obvious won’t happen next.