>Here is the big picture. I am using X-Works to write a feedback form. With Netscape, I can use MailTo to send their information to me via E-mail. This does not work with Internet Explorer. Using MAPI, I suppose I would have to install MS exchange on the web server. Is there a way to invoke the client's E-mail package to send me their information? What do you suggest?

Here's what I use here:

For example, someone creates an entry in the Classified. This should generate an email to the owner of the forum and a CC to me.

So, the Universal Thread Classified module, is responsible to create a record in the EMAIL.DBF table. It goes like this:

INSERT INTO EMAIL (ADDRESS,MESSAGE,SUBJECT,FROM,TO,CC);
VALUES ('mfournier@transformation.com','Here is the body of the message',;
'Here is the message title','Here is the address from name','Here is the email to send to','Here is the CC to send to')

This is all each application is responsible to do. In this case, I didn't attach any file, but I could have pass 'c:\file.txt,d:\data\employee.doc' for the FILEATTACH field. Other fields in the email table can be used for the full name of the TO and CC fields. It can also accept more than one TO, CC and FILEATTACH items.

Then, the email framework, which is a dedicated application running all the time for the purpose of sending an email will detect that a new record need to be sent.

Each application should not be responsible of sending an email. A robot application should handle that.

Let's say you give your VFP Web application the responsibility of sending this email. What if you can't connect to the SMTP server or any other failure happens. This can easily lock your application and it won't be able to respond to other incoming requests from the Web.

The same goes with a desktop application where a user should not wait for an email to be sent, especially in the event where the application has to retry several times, in case the SMTP server is down, to send this email. We can't assume that. The application is responsible to just create a record in email.dbf and the user can continue with any operation.

The robot email application, since it only serves that, can retry until the mail is sent without affecting a user because there is no one waiting for a response either on the Web or from a desktop application.