I was out of town after I posted the topic of email notifications, so I'm not sure if anyone ever chimed in or not.

Essentially, I'm wondering if FMP can do automated email notifications (like phpBBS for example).

Have a situation where managers need to be notified when a record is created, and staff need to be notified when someone responds to a comment made in a comment portal.

Ideally, it would even send a link that would go to the FMP record if in-house, or to the web published version if out of the office. Of course this would be a bonus. Just the notification would be great.

Thoughts?

Nate

Yes Nate, I think a couple people chimed in. Thanks for reposting this topic.

In most cases our approach to this is to have an "agent" machine periodically run a script to look for records that require a notification and then send out the required emails. This agent is a regular FileMaker Pro Client machine running something like the Events Plugin or ScriptFire plugin to run this script every X minutes.

This lets your records get created however you'd like (even by import or IWP) without you having to attach a "Do we need to email about this?" script to every editing action or field validation.

You might want to keep a log of when the agent sent notifications. If someone shuts down your agent for a couple days, you need someway to have it email all the notifications it should have sent while it was down. Depending on your scenario, this log might be "in" the record the notification concerns.

Sending the email can of course also be done with a plugin. While we normally use SMTP-IT, I see that just today Fusion released a new version of Sendmail.

Great idea!

Any thoughts on SMTP-it vs. Dacons' mail.it.3?

Nate

Not really; unfortunately. I tend to use SMTP-It for everything, though I should probably branch out.