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The Notification Mailer is a program that performs E-mail send and response processing for the Oracle Workflow Notification System. It polls the database for messages that have to be sent, and performs the following action for each message:

• Resolves the recipient role to a single E-mail address, which itself can be a mail list.

• Switches its database session to the role's preferred language and territory as defined by the directory service.

• Generates the message and any optional attachments using the appropriate message template.

• Sends the message via UNIX Sendmail or Oracle Office/InterOffice and any necessary gateway product.

Once you set up the Notification Mailer to run, it continually polls the database for messages to send and checks its response mail account for responses to process. You do not have to do anything else unless you have a need to shut it down and restart it again with different parameters.

Note: The Notification Mailer runs against Oracle Office/InterOffice or UNIX Sendmail depending on the version of the Notification Mailer concurrent program you install for your site.

Attention: The Notification Mailer will shut itself down if a database failure is encountered or if the PL/SQL package state for the session is invalid due to dropping or replacing of package definitions. You can use the concurrent manager to restart the Notification Mailer program manually or schedule it to restart periodically in case it ever exits with a failure.

You can install and set up the Notification Mailer to run against UNIX Sendmail or Oracle Office/InterOffice. However, before doing so, you must set up a least one mail account for the Notification Mailer in one of these two mail applications. You must also define three folders or files in your mail account to use response processing.

   To start the Notification Mailer for UNIX Sendmail or Oracle Office/InterOffice:

1. The Notification Mailer program is registered as a concurrent program. You can run the Notification Mailer concurrent program from the Submit Requests form or from the command line.

2. To run the concurrent program from the Submit Requests form, navigate to the Submit Requests form.

Note: Your system administrator needs to add this concurrent program to a request security group for the responsibility that you want to run this program from. See: Overview of Concurrent Programs and Requests

3. Submit the Notification Mailer concurrent program as a request. See: Submitting a Request.

4. In the Parameters window, enter the path and filename of a configuration file. The configuration file contains the parameters you want to run with the Notification Mailer.

5. Choose OK to close the Parameters window.

6. When you finish modifying the print and run options for this request, choose Submit to submit the request.

7. Rather than use the Submit Requests form, you can also run the Notification Mailer concurrent program from the command line. Enter:

	WFMAIL apps/pwd 0 Y FILE config_file

Replace apps/pwd with username and password to the APPS schema, replace config_file with the file specification of the configuration file that contains the parameters you want to run with the Notification Mailer.

A file specification is specified as:

		@<application_short_name>:[<dir>/.../]file.ext

or

		<native path>

   To create a configuration file for the Notification Mailer:

1. Oracle Workflow provides an example configuration file, called wfmail.cfg. The file resides in the resource subdirectory under $FND_TOP on your server.

2. The content of the configuration file is formatted as follows:

#Description PARAMETER1=value1

#Description PARAMETER2=value2

...

Any text preceded by # is not interpreted and can be used for including comments. List each parameter name on the left side of the equal sign (=) and specify a value for each parameter on the right.

3. The parameters are as follows:

Attention: If you want to start the Sendmail version of the Notification Mailer concurrent program, then the Account parameter must be set to the account from which you start the Concurrent Manager.

NODE	(Required) The node identifier name. You can have multiple workflow databases route messages through the same mail account. By defining an identifying node name for each Notification Mailer running against each database, responses can be routed back to the correct database without requiring database connection information to be included in the message. The node name is included with the outgoing notification ID. The default name is main.
FROM	The value that appears in the From: field of the message header when a notification message is delivered to a user.
SUMMARYONLY	(Required) Indicate whether this Notification Mailer processes only notifications assigned to users/roles with a notification preference of 'SUMMARY' or whether it only processes notifications for users/roles with a notification preference of 'MAILTEXT' or 'MAILHTML'. Valid values are Y or N. The default is N. You should set up at least two Notification Mailers, one where SUMMARYONLY=Y and one where SUMMARYONLY=N if any of your workflow users or roles have a notification preference of 'MAILTEXT', 'MAILHTML', or 'SUMMARY'. See: Setting Up Users and Roles from a Directory Repository: .

Attention: If you set SUMMARYONLY=Y, then the Notification Mailer will shut itself down after it polls the database and deliveries any appropriate notification summaries. You must therefore schedule the Notification Mailer to run at the frequency you want notification summaries to be delivered. This involves scheduling the Notification Mailer concurrent program in the Submit Request form.

IDLE	The number of seconds to wait before checking for messages to send. The value must be an integer greater than or equal to zero. The default is 60.
LOG	The name of a log file to record activity. A valid value would be a filename. This parameter is valid only for the standalone version of the Notification Mailer. For the concurrent program version of the Notification Mailer, the activity output goes to the concurrent manager log file.
SHUTDOWN	The name of a file that cues the Notification Mailer to shut down. This lets you safely shut down the Notification Mailer without killing the process. The Notification Mailer always looks for the shutdown file in its current working directory before looking for notifications to process. If the file exists, then the Notification Mailer shuts down. You must remove the shutdown file to restart the Notification Mailer again. The default filename is shutdown.
	The current working directory is the $APPLCSF/$APPLLOG directory. If you have not set the $APPLCSF environment variable, then place the shutdown file in the $FND_TOP/$APPLLOG directory.
FAILCOMMAND	The command to run if the Notification Mailer encounters a fatal error.
DEBUG	Indicate whether to print debugging information in the log. Valid values include Y or N. The default is N.
TEST_ADDRESS	Indicate a test E-mail address to direct all outgoing E-mail notifications. The test address overrides each recipient's E-mail address so that you can test a workflow process without having to change each recipient's E-mail address to access the test notifications.
REPLYTO	A default E-mail address to reply to, if the E-mail account that processes responses is different from the E-mail account that sends outgoing notifications.
HTMLAGENT	The base URL that identifies the HTML Web Agent that handles HTML notification responses. This URL is required to support E-mail notifications with HTML attachments. The default URL is derived from the token WF_WEB_AGENT stored in the WF_RESOURCES table, but you can override this default by entering a different value for this parameter. See: Identifying the Oracle Web Agent used by Oracle Workflow.
HTMLFILE	The filename of the default attachment. The default is attach.html.
HTMLDESC	A description of the default attachment. The default is HTML.
HTMLTYPE	The html attachment type number. This argument is required only if you are using Oracle Office/InterOffice and want to include an HTML attachment with your E-mail notification. The default is 10003.
DISCARD	The name of the mail folder or full path name of the mail file to put discarded messages. A '-' preceding the name causes the Notification Mailer to truncate the folder or file on startup. The default is discard.
PROCESS	The name of the mail folder or full path name of the mail file to put processed notification messages. A '-' preceding the name causes the Notification Mailer to truncate the folder or file on startup. The default is processed.
UNPROCESS	The name of the mail folder or the full path name of the mail file to put unprocessed notification messages. A '-' preceding the name causes the Notification Mailer to truncate the folder or file on startup. The default is unprocessed.
TAGFILE	The full path and name of a tag file. The tag file lists strings of text found in unusual messages and the mail status you want to assign to a message response if it contains any of those strings. Unusual messages include bounced or returned messages, auto-reply messages such as those sent by vacation daemons, mass mailing lists, and so on. Since different mail systems vary in how they identify bounced, undeliverable, or otherwise invalid messages, you can use a tag file to specify how your mail system identifies those stray messages and how you want the Notification Mailer to handle those messages should it come across them.
	Attention: It is important that you uniquely identify bounced messages from normal responses so that Oracle Workflow does not mistaken a bounced message as an invalid response or a legitimate response as a bounced message.
	The format used in the tag file is Mail_status "Matching string" where Mail_status can be the value: ERROR, INVALID, IGNORE, or UNAVAIL and "Matching string" is the text to look for in the From: line, Subject: line, or body of the message. If a message is marked IGNORE, the Notification Mailer ignores the message and moves it to the processed mail folder/file. If the message is marked with any other mail status, no further processing occurs on the message.
	For example, if you want to mark all message responses that contain the string "-- Unsent message follows --" in the subject or body of the message as an error, you can include the following line in your tag file: ERROR "-- Unsent message follows --"
	Oracle Workflow provides an example tag file called wfmail.tag. The file resides on your server in the resource subdirectory under $FND_TOP.