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First, let me say that Blat has nothing to do
with Oracle. But it has been a great addition to my toolkit over
the years, whenever I have needed to have a Windows server
application provide some type of user notification based on an
event. It is a Windows command line utility for sending email
and is public domain software (free!), available at
www.blat.net.
Why would someone be interested in Blat?
Sometimes an application just needs to be able to notify one or
more users about specific situations that occur, where the best
type of notification is email. But many Windows servers do not
have an email client, such as Outlook, installed and configured.
And even if an email client is installed, using it to send an
email from an application may not be the most straight forward
task to perform.
And this is where Blat comes in. No installation
is necessary. No email client is necessary. Simply copy the file
blat.exe to any directory in your command line path, such
as \WINDOWS\system32, and you are ready to send email
using a command like this:
blat - -body "
" -s "Subject line text" -server mail.myserver.com -to
recipient@anotherserver.com -f sender@myserver.com
The output from the
above command is:
Blat v2.5.0 w/GSS
encryption (build : Sep 14 2005 22:46:29)
Sending stdin.txt to recipient@anotherserver.com
Subject: Subject line text
Login name is sender@myserver.com
The result is that an email with no message body
is sent to recipient@anotherserver.com with the subject
line Subject line text.
The arguments are:
| - |
The first argument is a file
name that contains the message body. If the first
argument is a dash, then blat expects the message body
to be supplied through the command line. |
| -body |
Text to be used for the
message body. For application purposes, a message body
may not be necessary, just a subject line. blat still
requires a value, which in this case is a space. |
| -s |
Subject line. If not provided,
the file name that appears in the subject line "Contents
of file: file name". If the message body is provided on
the command line, the file name will be stdin.txt. |
| -server |
The SMTP mail server through
which the email is to be sent. |
| -to |
The email address of the
recipient |
| -f |
The email address of the
sender. The sender's address must be recognized by the
mail server. |
Many other options are available, with
documentation available through the Blat web site or by typing
blat -h at the command line.
Note: This tip was tested on
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
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