Life Cycle of an Outbound Email

The following are the general steps used to create an outbound email:

  1. Create an MCFOutboundEmail object

  2. Set the usual properties for an email, such as the From, Subject, Recipients, and Text properties.

  3. If necessary, set the parts of the email using MCFMultipart and MCFBodyPart classes.

  4. Use the Send method to send the email.

The MCFPart and MCFEmail classes provide the common functionality for the MCFBodyPart and MCFOutboundEmail (and MCFInboundEmail) classes, respectively. In general, you never need to use the MCFPart or MCFEmail classes directly in your PeopleCode programs. However, in rare cases you may use these classes if you want to extend the application package.

The SMTPSession class encapsulates all the session parameters that can be set in a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) session. Each MCFOutboundEmail object points to one SMTPSession object. In most cases, the parameters for the SMTP session are set from values found in the application server configuration file (psappsrv.cfg). However, you can also set these parameters by creating an SMTPSession object, setting the desired parameters, then creating an MCFOutboundEmail object.

For convenience, all SMTP attributes are also directly accessible from the MCFOutboundEmail class, so you don't need to create an SMTPSession object when you're sending just one email.

When you want to send many emails in a single SMTP session, you don't have to set the SMTP session parameter in each and every email. For this case, you can create a single SMTPSession, using either the default settings or explicitly setting the desired parameters, then use the CreateOutboundEmail method of SMTPSession object to create all the MCFOutboundEmail objects. This way all the MCFOutboundEmail objects use the same SMTP session parameters. After specifying the value of all the parameters for all the MCFOutboundEmail objects, use the SendAll method of SMTPSession object to send all the emails in one SMTP session.

All the application classes mentioned above hold all the data until one of the Send methods is called. The Send methods connect to the mail server using a JavaMail API that sends the mail.

Since all communication to the mail server happens when a Send method is called, errors are only reported when the Send method returns. The return value indicates the success or the failure of the send process. In case of failure, you can query the MCFOutboundEmail application class for the details of the error. The error details are available in properties such as MessageSetNumber, MessageNumber, ErrorDescription, ErrorDetails, and so on.