E-Mail Settings - Document Design Manager

The E-Mail Settings option allows you to configure default message details if the document is printed to E-Mail. (This option is not available for all documents – for example cheques in the Purchase Ledger)

Data item containing e-mail address – select the data item from the main file in the application that contains the email address to be used.The main files for each application are:

Sales Statements – Sales Accounts File

Purchase Statements / Remittance – Purchase Accounts File

Send Automatically– controls whether the message is to be displayed for confirmation/amendment before sending. See notes on Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express below.

Filename to Save As– the document is saved as an attachment to the email with a filename of the document title. You may want to save with a more relevant name. You only enter the filename not the path or suffix and you can use ‘!nnn’ to pick up a value from the main file record (where nnn is a three-digit data item number – 002 etc.). Data Items available can be viewed by clicking the LIST button at the foot of the parameter screen.

Address – this option asks for a ‘hard-coded’ email address to which to send the email to as an alternative to picking up the address from a main file record. You may use this on Stock Documents, Picking Documents in Sales Order Processing, etc., to send the document to the warehouse.

Subject – enter the subject of the email. Again you can use !nnn to pick up a value from the main file record and in addition to the standard 160 fields available from the database you can use special items to pick up:

161 – Document Date

162 – User Name

164 – Document Balance

NB: Item 163 - Document Reference is not applicable for Sales Statements

Message – enter the message detail as required. Again you can use !nnn to pick up items from the main file or include the extra 161+ items above.

Wordwrap – when you send a message the text is output as entered above but the use of !nnn items may cause one line entered in the message to overflow into two lines on the email. Setting the option to word wrap outputs the message text as paragraphs, a new paragraph starting after a blank line. You can also force a new paragraph by entering ‘%%’ at the start of the line.

Automatic Emails and Outlook Express / Microsoft Outlook

Security developments in later versions of Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook mean that, by default, you cannot send emails automatically – a message is displayed warning that a program (i.e. Datafile) is trying to send an email message and asks whether you wish to proceed with the send (and you can’t respond Yes for a number of seconds). This feature was introduced to prevent viruses spreading themselves to everyone in your address book. This feature cannot be disabled by Datafile.

Outlook Express can be set to disable this warning via the Tools / Options menu and the Security tab.Disabling ‘Warn me when other applications try to send mail as me’ will prevent the warning message. If you do this you must ensure that your virus checker and firewalls are currently up-to-date and are kept up-to-date.

Microsoft Outlook does not have an equivalent option to this. Microsoft Support does notify that if using Outlook on top of Exchange Server then you can set via ‘Administer Outlook Security’ tools trusted programs that are allowed to send emails automatically.

Finally, Outlook Express can be set to send mail immediately on creation. When this is set the email message is sent after each, for example, statement is produced in Datafile and Datafile cannot continue to the next statement until Outlook Express has sent the message. As you might imagine even on a broadband connection this can take some time.Within Outlook Express selecting Tools / Options and the ‘Send’ tab allows you to disable the option to send mail immediately.

Automatic Email and Anti-Virus Software

As with the security checking introduced by Microsoft, anti-virus checkers can also look for several e-mail messages being sent in a short period of time. Anti-virus checkers generally warn when more than one message is sent with the same subject (which could be avoided by using the !nnn function to pick up a value from the main data item record), and also warn if a number of messages are sent within a number of seconds (these details depend on the virus software). Generally the Anti-virus software will pause the sending of the email message(s) and ask you to confirm it is OK to send.