Mail sending for beginners

Mail sending for beginners

Sending information by mail is one of the oldest technologies
in networks. The standard for mail transfer was declared in 1980.
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
SMTP has been supported in IRIS since the beginning and also before.
Over time, various features have evolved, especially related to
security, encoding, authentication, multipart messages, …
The related documentation is excellent in all details. You find a rich set of
Classes, Methods, Utilities and Examples in %Net.* class documentation.

This example shows a very simple starting point into the subject.
If you send an email, you need an SMTP server that receives it.
It could be some external server of your choice, but again, IRIS is
well prepared to serve you. Interoperability provides all you need.
So this package provides you with a minimal-sized Production for testing.
Instead of a real Production, the service writes the input into a global
that you can check immediately.
So the demo can run in a single instance for sending and receiving mail.
A slim test routine for all required steps is provided.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have git and Docker desktop installed.

Installation

Clone/git pull the repo into any local directory:

https://github.com/rcemper/smtp.git

Build the Docker container from the download directory:

docker compose --progress plain build

Run the IRIS container with your project and check startup:

docker-compose up -d   && docker-compose logs -f

Testing

Start an IRIS sess in namespace USER

docker-compose exec iris iris session iris

Now load the test utility

USER>ZLOAD smtp PRINT
mail     ;
         s %mail=##class(%Net.MailMessage).%New()
         s %mail.From="iris@home.at"
         s %mail.Sender="iris@home.at"
         s %mail.Subject="Test from ISOS"
         d %mail.TextData.WriteLine("demo test mail from ISOS")
         d %mail.TextData.WriteLine("more text from ISOS")
         s %mail.MessageSize=%mail.TextData.SizeGet()
         d %mail.To.Insert("irisowner")
         ;;
         s %smtp=##class(%Net.SMTP).%New()
         s %smtp.smtpserver="localhost"
         s %smtp.port=30025
         q
start
         w ##class(Ens.Director).StartProduction("mail.Receive")
         q
send
         s sc=%smtp.Send(%mail)
         zw sc
         i 'sc d $system.OBJ.DisplayError(sc)
         q
view
         zw ^txt
         q
stop
         w ##class(Ens.Director).StopProduction()
         q

From command line prompt

USER>

you have these 5 options to type in

• do mail ; is composing a simple mail with 2 lines
  for more text, add content to character stream %mail.TextData
  and don’t forget to also adjust the text size
• do start ; is starting the SMTP server production

17:27:37.285:Ens.Director: Production 'mail.Receive' starting...
17:27:37.332:Ens.Director: Production 'mail.Receive' started.1

• do send ; is sending your mail to server

sc=1

if an error is returned, code and details are displayed

sc="0 "_$lb($lb(6031,,,,,,,,,$lb(,"USER",$lb("e^Send+42^%Net.SMTP.1^2","e^send+1^smtp^1","d^^smtp^0"))))
ERROR #6031: Unable to open TCP/IP connection.

• do view ; shows the lines received by SMTP Production

^txt=1
^txt(1,1)="EHLO 5a950947449d"
^txt(1,2)="MAIL FROM: <iris@home.at>"
^txt(1,3)="RCPT TO: <irisowner>"
^txt(1,4)="DATA"
^txt(1,5)="Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:02:07 UT"
^txt(1,6)="From: iris@home.at"
^txt(1,7)="Subject: Test from ISOS"
^txt(1,8)="Sender: iris@home.at"
^txt(1,9)="To: irisowner"
^txt(1,10)="MIME-Version: 1.0"
^txt(1,11)="Content-Type: text/plain; charset=""us-ascii"""
^txt(1,12)="Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable"
^txt(1,13)=""
^txt(1,14)="demo test mail from ISOS=0Amore text from ISOS=0A"
^txt(1,15)=""
^txt(1,16)="."
^txt(1,17)="QUIT"

• do stop ; stops the SMTP Server Production

17:45:48.370:Ens.Director: StopProduction initiated.
17:45:48.376:Ens.Director: No Production is running (Stopped)1

Access to System Management Portal
and Interoperability Portal

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