Sending email and get delivery notification

Question

Hi,
I want to send an email from HTMLDB and I see that the HTMLB mail package also use the utl_smtp package to implement this function. So I write a store procedure to send email with the help of utl_smtp and it works. Additional to every send I want a delivery confirmation to the sender adress, because it is very important to see, which mails weren't delivered. I've searched for an parameter to set and found these syntaxes in the "PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference".
UTL_SMTP.MAIL (
c IN OUT NOCOPY connection,
sender IN VARCHAR2,
parameters IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL);
UTL_SMTP.RCPT (
c IN OUT NOCOPY connection,
recipient IN VARCHAR2,
parameters IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL)
RETURN reply;
UTL_SMTP.RCPT (
c IN OUT NOCOPY connection,
recipient IN VARCHAR2,
parameters IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL);
The following statement stay in the Reference for the description of "parameters":
parameters The additional parameters to RCPT command as defined in Section 6 of [RFC1869]. It should follow the format of "XXX=XXX (XXX=XXX ....)".
I read a little bit about SMTP in RFC1869 and I write change the statements:
utl_smtp.mail(mail_conn,sender);
utl_smtp.rcpt(mail_conn,recipient);
to:
utl_smtp.mail(mail_conn,sender, 'NOTIFY="SUCCESS,FAILURE"');
utl_smtp.rcpt(mail_conn,recipient, 'NOTIFY="SUCCESS,FAILURE"');
I get now the following syntax error: "ORA-29279: SMTP permanent error: 501 Syntax Error"
I tried also the statement without success:
utl_smtp.mail(mail_conn,sender, 'NOTIFY=SUCCESS,FAILURE');
utl_smtp.rcpt(mail_conn,recipient, 'NOTIFY=SUCCESS,FAILURE');
What can I do to get this delivery confirmation. E.g. in Outlook is possible to set this as option for emails before you send it. Any ideeas?
Thanks!
Serban Vettori

Answer 1

Hi,
I read at first parts of RFC 1869 (stands in your documentation) but it doesn't help me too much because it wasn't a concrete example there. The best adress is the RFC1891 "SMTP Delivery Status Notifications", that contains a lot of examples like:
MAIL FROM:<[email protected]> RET=HDRS ENVID=QQ314159
<<< 250 ok
RCPT TO:<[email protected]> NOTIFY=FAILURE \ORCPT=rfc822;[email protected]
<<< 550 error - no such recipient
RCPT TO:<[email protected]> NOTIFY=SUCCESS,FAILURE \ORCPT=rfc822;[email protected]
<<< 250 recipient ok
DATA<<< 354 send message, end with '.'
(message goes here)
.<<< 250 message received
QUIT<<< 221 bye
Your documentation is realy good but in this case wasn't really helpful. If you implement a function it were nice to document any input parameter. The user have to read several other documents to get ONE parameter! I personally don't like this. Perhaps there are other users which are really exalted to see such cross references.
Here is the right syntax for this problem:
utl_smtp.rcpt(conn, recipient, 'NOTIFY=SUCCESS,FAILURE')
You get in this way delivery notifications on succeded and failed messages. If you just want to get a delivery success notification just assign the input variable "parameters" with this value: 'NOTIFY=SUCCESS'. There is also a third possible value you can choose: "DELAY". This mean "notify me, if there is an email sending delay".
Best regards,
Serban Vettori