>I have an app in use at several educational institutions around the USA. Most of these institutions have their own mail servers set up with varying degrees of security. However, the people using my app have no control over the mail server or email policy.
>I would like to provide a quick and _reliable_ way for users to send a notice via email to another user within the same institution. Within my app, keeping a mini-address book of users is no problem. What I need to know is: What technique should I use to actually send an email so that "sending" will work reliably? For example, can I assume that CDO is available on all Win2K and WInXP machines and that a SMTP server is available to them? Can I assume that a mail server (inside the same institution) will let CDO pass a message without choking on a required authentication step? Might it be better to actually pass a would-be email as a form via HTTP to a web server at _my_ institution that I control, and then generate the actual email from there and have the email physically originate from our institution but carry the correct return address? This seems a bit more cumbersome to implement, but also seems less vulnerable to unpredictable email policies at different institutions.
