Luca Bertagnolio (lucaberta@yahoo.com) has written these notes. Thanks Luca. Notes on e-mail notification for MSG-1 messages Hi, here are some quick notes describing my current setup for MSG-1 Data Manager, in order to exploit the new Update Notification feature added by David in version 1.2. In order to send email from within a batch file, a small utility called BLAT comes in handy. It's a very tiny freeware software that can be used to send an email from a command line or a batch file. BLAT home page: http://www.interlog.com/~tcharron/blat.html BLAT download link: http://www.interlog.com/~tcharron/blat194.zip It is important to read the included doc file, as some minimal installation needs to be done the first time. The BLAT.EXE file should go in a directory part of the search PATH (suggested \WINNT\SYSTEM32 on Win2k, or \WINDOWS\SYSTEM on older Win98/ME), and then "BLAT -install" should be invoked in order to configure the default outgoing (SMTP) mail relay. The SMTP mail relay is the server that accept email and forwards it towards its destination; every ISP has one (usually more), and its name or IP address can be found in the ISP help pages or checking your email client configuration. SMTP (meaning Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the protocol used on the Internet to exchange email. After setting up BLAT, a batch file called MsgNotify.bat has to be created in the MSG-1 Data Manager directory. If found, MDM will invoke that batch file upon receiving a new version of an ADMIN, NEWS or Report bulletin, and will keep a copy of that bulletin in the \Images\Reports\ folder. My MsgNotify.bat looks like this: if exist %1 ( blat %1 -f "MSG-1 Notify Daemon " -t lucaberta@yahoo.com -s %2 ) BLAT is invoked with a few parameters, -f is the "From:" address, -t is the "To: address, and -s is the "Subject:" of the email. %1 is the first parameter passed to the batch file, it's the name of the text file with the bulletin content, %2 is the first line of that same bulletin, enclosed in "quotes" so it can be fed as a single parameter to batch files. Some ISPs might have some strict check on the "From:" address when they accept an email for delivery (this is to try to stop SPAM email), so using your same email address for "From:" and "To:" should work without any problems. You're just sending email to yourself, which is considered legal! ;-) That's it! If anyone experiments with this, please let me know your experiences. Bye and 73 de Luca ON/IK2OVV Brussels, Belgium 07 August 2003