How to create bulk email agent for a DB

[keyvany]

Hi,

I desperately need some help on how to create an agent ( if it's called agent, since I am completely new to Notes)in a contact database to do this:

When I am in the database, I would like to choose some names, have a button on top saying " bulk email to outlook", click on that button so outlook autamatically opens and sends the choosen names to its outbox to be emailed. Where shall I start?
how can I achive this?

I appreciate your insight in advance,
Kayvan

 

[LNotesGuy]

You're correct in the terminology - it might be an agent that needs writing - OR - you might simply write the code within the action button or hotspot itself. That all depends on where the button is being pressed. Is this a Notes client application or a web application? If it's a web application, it will - in all liklihood - will end up being an agent, probably. If it's in a Notes application, you might be able to accomplish this simply within the Action button code itself. However, you're also throwing another wrench into the picture by having to deal with Exchange addresses. Notes can create a mail memo and send it to Notes users that are contained in the Notes Name & Address book quite easily. However, if you're wanting to send the memo from within Notes to Exchange users (using their Exchange email addresses instead)- even if they already have Notes accounts - then you're going to need access to their Exchange email addresses somehow (thus the reason for launching the Exchange client, I presume). There are a couple of ways to do this depending on what you have available to you. If your Exchange users happen to also be Notes users, you could populate their Internet Address field in their Notes Person record with their Exchange SMTP mail address (assuming you're not using that field for anything else), i.e joe.user@abc.com. Your agent could then simply expose the Domino directory for name choosing, but instead of taking your chosen names and placing them into your Notes memo 'SendTo' field, your agent (or button code) would need to walk the list of names entered and subsequently retrieve their respective Internet Addresses (their Exchange e-mail addresses stored within their Notes Person record - or any other db that might have their Exchange email addresses stored in). Then, you would place those addresses into the 'SendTo' field on your Notes form and @Mail the memo (if you're writing in @Formula language). If you're writing in Lotus script, you would use the mail.send command. This way, you wouldn't have to launch the Exchange client at all, Domino would simply mail the Notes message using SMTP directly to the Exchange mailboxes of the chosen users. That's assuming you have Exchange email addresses somewhere where you can grab them. If this is not the case, but you would still like to accomplish this sort of UI, you could start by exporting your Exchange global address book(which includes user's SMTP addresses), scrub the list of any mail-in addresses or data not needed fromt he exported record, port the results into a stand-alone db, and look to that db as the address source. However, you might run into @DBLookup limitations - thus the reason for adding the exchange email address to a Person record in the NAB instead (in order to take advantage of the NAB address lookup UI that is built in). It can be done, but it's not necessarily a simple process. There are other solutions as well - but I don't have enough info from your posting to offer them up at this point. Sorry for the long post without any specific direction provided.