Last update:
October 26, 2004
There are various ways to send an e-mail from Pragma 5. The following discussion presumes that you have Microsoft Outlook Express 5 on your machine.
The first thing that you have to do is to find the path and filename of the e-mail program. On my machine, running Windows 2000, it is
c:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe
Note that if you start msimn.exe without any command line parameters you get the full Outlook express, where you can select what to do (Inbox, Outbox etc.), not just the e-mail dialog box itself. This is normal. You have to add a command line argument to directly display the e-mail dialog box.
In Pragma 5 you can display the e-mail dialog box directly, with a SYSTEM CALL. As the only argument you must add:
/mailurl:mailto:<e-mail address>?cc=<copy to>&bcc=&subject=<subject>&body=<body>
where
| <e-mail address> | is the address where you want
to send the e-mail, for instance photz@logicallbusiness.com.
|
| <copy to> | is the address or the addresses
of where you want to send copies of the e-mail.
|
| <subject> | is the subject of the e-mail.
|
| <body> | is the body (text) of the
e-mail.
|
Note that the brackets (< >) have been added only for clarity to show you where you must insert your string but are not part of the argument.
All the strings that you can insert are optional. Omitting them will simply
leave the corresponding fields blank.
Therefore if you want to display the e-mail dialog box without any pre-filled
field you would add the following argument:
/mailurl:mailto:?cc=&bcc=&subject=&body=
no spaces between the various characters.
We have tested the system call only with Pragma 5.
Many thanks to Peter Griffioen and Frans Loewe of HouseWare for their help.
Part of the information has been taken from the following Microsoft documentation:
Q197782: OL2000: Command Line for Creating a Pre-addressed E-mail Message.
Q197180: OL2000: Additional Command line Switches.