Randy,

Some ideas:

1. Run your email sending application as an NT service written in VFP. Calvin Hsia's blog has some tips on how to create a VFP based NT service.

2. Run your email sending application as a regular form that gets launched by your main application(s) if its found to be not already running. You could launch this application minimized or run it with an icon placed in the system tray (see the VFP solution samples for a system tray example or bbcontrols.com for a low cost ActiveX control that does the same). The advantage of running your email app as a real visible form (vs. 1x1 pixel form) is that you may want to activate it and see stats on number of messages sent, messages in the queue, max length of time as message was queued, connection status, recent error messages (from SMTP servers), etc) as well as manually start, stop, or pause this application for various reasons.

3. You can also run as a regular form (with timer to check table for new email messages) and hide the form from the taskbar by setting the form's ShowInTaskbar property to .F.

Do these ideas sound like they might apply to your situation?

BTW: My suggestion would be to start with option 2 above (for debugging purposes) and then evolve it to 1 or 3 after you have everything working.

Malcolm