Essentially, JMail 4.0 enables your Web sites to send and receive e-mail. This might
sound like "just another neat feature" which you might use to
"send feedback forms" or "send out a newsletter." But in
fact it is much more revolutionary than this. The ability of Web sites to send
and receive e-mails is for Internet evolution as significant as fish sprouting
legs and running up on the beach. Let me show you how JMail 4.0 indeed elevates
your Web site to the rank of a communicative member in a growing human/computer
community.
Between Administrator and Web Site
The most immediate benefit I will get from JMail is to allow myself to add
articles to my Web developer site simply by sending e-mails to it. My Web site will read the
e-mail, check that it came from me, then copy the contents out of the e-mail
into the online database. The next user who hits the site will see the new
article. Nice!
Between Member and Web Site
If you run a virtual community, you can use JMail to allow your
members to contribute articles by sending them via e-mail to the Web site. When
the Web site receives the article, instead of saving it immediately to the
database as in the example above, it forwards the article to you for approval. You read the article and reply back to the Web site
making any necessary corrections in the text. The Web site receives the
corrected article from you and publishes it in the online database, then sends a
confirmation e-mail to the author informing him that his article has been
published. Efficient computer/human interaction!
Between Web Site and Web Site
Now let's say you want to allow these articles to be published on third-party
Web sites. Administrators of other Web sites could come to your Web site and
"sign their Web sites up" to receive your articles. Then whenever your
Web site receives and publishes an article, it also sends that article out to
the list of subscription Web sites via e-mail. These third-party Web sites in
turn receive the article via e-mail, check to see that it is coming from a
trusted Web site, then publish the article immediately into their online
databases.
The Features of JMail 4.0
Although JMail can be accessed by most server-side languages, it is most
popular with ASP programmers. After downloading
JMail 4.0 free, it is a 60-second install on IIS or PWS. Then you just need
to set up a free POP3 mail account somewhere, copy and experiment with my code for receiving mail and the
code for sending mail, and
you will have your Web site receiving and sending e-mail by the end of the hour.
JMail gives you access to the following information on incoming mail: sender name, sender e-mail, full header text, all "to:" recipients and
"cc:" recipients, and e-mail priority. Attachments can be saved to any directory
(e.g. if you want to allow students to upload Word files or journalists to attach .jpg photos to accompany their stories). One nice feature is that it
gives you access to the "pure text" version of HTML mail in variable
form, so even if your users send e-mail in HTML format, you don't have to pick through all the HTML tags but have immediate access to the plain
ASCII content in one variable. Very practical.
As far as sending e-mail, JMail allows your Web site to send both text and HTML formatted mail to multiple "to:", "cc:" and
"bcc:" recipients. You can send any kind of attachment and include as many as you want. You can send
embedded graphics in HTML by including the img tag with exterior links to your graphics.
(I use this facility in my weekly Web developer's newsletter.) A very nice feature of JMail 4.0 is the ability to send a URL as an e-mail with just one
command! This would allow you to dynamically generate a newsletter as an .htm file, then send it at once with the send url command, leaving the .htm
file on your server as an archive of the newsletter for future access by your Web visitors.
Although e-mail is relatively secure by nature, if you need more security, JMail enables you to encode and decode PGP in your e-mails. You can even
read the e-mail headers to find out IP addresses and such which gives you information about the real origin of the e-mail.
Used together, these are powerful security features.
E-Mail the Killer App
E-Mail has been around since the early 70s and has become the backbone of
communication for not only the academic and corporate worlds but is quickly
becoming the communication of choice for society in general. JMail is exciting
because it empowers your Web site to communicate with both humans and other
computers in this tried and true medium.
