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Learning Oracle PL/SQL
book

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

by Bill Pribyl, Steven Feuerstein
November 2001
Beginner content levelBeginner
424 pages
11h 11m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Oracle PL/SQL

8.1. Sending Internet Email from PL/SQL

In most libraries, there is a way for a borrower to reserve a book that has been checked out by someone else. When the other person returns the book, the person who reserved it should receive notification. What a great application of sending email from PL/SQL!

Logically, sending email via the Internet is a process usually requiring four (or five, depending on how you count them) pieces of information:

  • Sender's email address

  • Recipient's email address

  • The actual content of the message

  • A subject for the message

  • The name of a mail server (should be defaulted)

So, one can easily imagine a procedure for sending email that goes something like this:

PROCEDURE send_mail (
   sender_email IN VARCHAR2,
   recipient_email IN VARCHAR2,
   message IN VARCHAR2,
   subject IN VARCHAR2,
   mailhost IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT 'mailhost'
);

Almost unbelievably, Oracle doesn't provide such a procedure, but instead gives us a very low-level package called UTL_SMTP that we somehow need to deal with. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the name of the standard way that Internet mail servers communicate.[1] Before looking at the guts of using it, though, let's step back to get a bigger picture.

[1] For those of you who are blessed with insatiable curiosity (or insomnia), you can read the actual contents of the SMTP standard in RFC-822, a document you can find with any Internet search engine.

Although the various protocols and underlying software involved in transmitting email ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596001800Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata