Comet Electronic Mail

The standard release of Comet includes two MTB subroutines that may be used by Comet developers to interface MTB application programs to the electronic mail system. Both subroutines take the form of MTB usefiles -- files that are inserted at compile time into an object program.

These two subroutines are called the Comet Electronic Mail Engine. One of the subroutines contains the declarative and format statements necessary for sending messages to the e-mail system, and the other subroutine contains the executable code that writes the messages to the e-mail system.

Usefile	Contents
UFCEMDEC	declarative and format statements
UFCEMEXE	executable code

Note: Both files are text files and are located in the UTL directory of the standard Comet release.

To incorporate these usefiles into your MTB programs, you must:

• include the UFCEMDEC usefile in the declarative section of your program

• include the UFCEMEXE usefile in the executable section of your program

• set the file logical unit numbers in the format section of your program (the "engine" uses 7 logical unit numbers; all are defined with the SET statement)

• assign the values to the entry variables (the data to be written to the e-mail system), including:
  • name of the recipient
  • name of the sender (optional)
  • company name (optional)
  • subject of the message (optional)
  • phone number (optional)
  • time (default is system time)
  • date (default is system date)
  • message flags (marked with an "X")
  • up to 12 message lines

• GOSUB to the "engine." The statement label for the engine is CEMSEND. This subroutine writes the message to the appropriate e-mail files and notifies the recipient(s) that a message has been sent.

After the CEMSEND subroutine is executed, two exit variables may be examined. One variable (CEMSENT) contains the number of messages that have been sent (for verifying group messages), the other (CEMERRNO) contains a program-internal error number (for verifying the status of the sent message).

See the sample program CEMTEST