Using the ASPMail script is a very straightforward process. All you need do is specify a page on your web site as the "action" page for your form, and then include the ASPMail script on that page.

Each form on your website will consist of 2 pages: A "form" page which actually holds your form, and an "action" page which processes your form when someone clicks on the "submit" button. For purposes of this discussion, we will refer to these pages as "form.html" and "aspmailform.asp". *

*Note: Your action page must have a .asp extension, even though it is an ordinary HTML file.

Once you have constructed your form using regular HTML make sure that your <form> tag specifies the "post" method, and that the action statement points to your "action" page. Example:

Simple Mail Example

Using the component is as simple as

1. Creating the object
2. Setting a few properties
3. Calling the SendMail method

The following code demonstrates how to use AspMail from VBScript. In this example Joe from Joe’s Widgets wishes to send an email to John Smith. Joe’s mail server is located at mailhost.localisp.net.

Set Mailer = Server.CreateObject("SMTPsvg.Mailer")
Mailer.FromName   = "Joe’s Widgets Corp."
Mailer.FromAddress= "Joe@somehost.com"
Mailer.RemoteHost = "mailhost.localisp.net"
Mailer.AddRecipient "John Smith", "jsmith@anotherhostname.com"
Mailer.Subject    = "Great SMTP Product!"
Mailer.BodyText   = "Dear Stephen" & VbCrLf & "Your widgets order has been processed!"
if Mailer.SendMail then
  Response.Write "Mail sent..."
else
  Response.Write "Mail send failure. Error was " & Mailer.Response
end if

By testing the result of the SendMail method we can determine if the mailing process was successful or not.

Form Handling

All or partial input for a message may come from a form. For example, a form posted to the server with a request method of GET (i.e. <form action="/scripts/AspMail.asp" method=get>) may provide the message recipient’s email address, subject and message text as follows:

Mailer.AddRecipient Request.QueryString("ToName"), Request.QueryString("ToAddress")
Mailer.Subject   =  Request.QueryString("Subject")
Mailer.BodyText  = Request.QueryString("MsgBody")

The form may also use the POST method (i.e. <form action="/scripts/AspMail.asp" method=post>) in which case the code would look as follows:

Mailer.AddRecipient Request.Form("ToName"), Request.Form("ToAddress")
Mailer.Subject   =  Request.Form ("Subject")
Mailer.BodyText  = Request.Form ("MsgBody")

You can use any mixture of static and dynamic data in setting the components properties as dictated by your needs. For example, you may wish to send the mail to a single user. In this case you could modify the code to look something like this:

Mailer.AddRecipient "John Smith", "jsmith@alocalhost.com"
Mailer.Subject   =  Request.QueryString("Subject")
Mailer.BodyText  = Request.QueryString("MsgBody")

Generic Form Handling

In some cases users may wish to use a number of different forms to send email with the same block of code. ASP allows you to loop through each QueryString or Form variable and append each one to string variable which is then assigned to the BodyText property.

strMsgHeader = "Form information follows" & vbCrLf
for each qryItem in Request.QueryString
   strMsgInfo = strMsgInfo &  qryItem & " - " & request.querystring(qryItem) & vbCrLf
next
strMsgFooter = vbCrLf & "End of form information"
Mailer.BodyText = strMsgHeader & strMsgInfo & strMsgFooter

To return form contents in the original form order your code might be...

strMsgHeader = "Form Information Follows: " & vbCrLf
for i = 1 to Request.Form.Count
  strMsgInfo = strMsgInfo & Request.Form.Key(i) & " - " &  Request.Form.Item(i) & vbCrLf
next
strMsgFooter = vbCrLf & "End of form information"
Mailer.BodyText = strMsgHeader & strMsgInfo & strMsgFooter

' Note this code only works for forms containing 128 or fewer field items

Setting Mail Priority

There are a couple of headers that can be modified to set message priority.

The Priority property sets the message priority on a scale of 1 to 5. A priority of 1 means HIGH. A priority of 3 means NORMAL and a priority of 5 means LOW. In addition to this you can also set the Urgent property if the message status is urgent. The Urgent property is a true/false property.

How to Use the DateTime Property

The component creates a Date/Time value for the message based on the calculated GMT time. The DateTime property was added to allow users to set a custom date/time timezone. The following code demonstrates how to set the DateTime to US Central Standard Time. By slightly altering the values underlined you can adjust this to work for your timezone.

[set other Mailer properties]
Mailer.DateTime = WeekDayName(WeekDay(Date), true) & ", " & Day(Date) & " " & MonthName(Month(Date), true) & " " & Year(Date) & " " & FormatDateTime(Now, 4) & " -0600 (CST)"
Mailer.SendMail

Notes About Creating the Mailer Object

You can create the mailer object at two different points in time:

• Immediately before sending an email
• At the session scope and saved as a session object

You will have to decide when and where it is appropriate to create the object based on your particular application. If you aren't sure which way to create the object reference, or for typical usage, you should create the object immediately before sending your email. Your code would look like this:

Set Mailer = Server.CreateObject("SMTPsvg.Mailer")
... [Set properties]
if Mailer.SendMail then ...

Creating these local references, as demonstrated above, allow you to use the object on multiple application threads at the same time.

To create an object reference at the session level, your code might look something like this:

if Not IsObject (session("Mailer")) then
  Set Mailer = Server.CreateObject("SMTPsvg.Mailer")
  Set session("Mailer") = Mailer
else
  Response.write "Cached session object reference being used<p>"
  Set Mailer = session("Mailer")
end if

Multiple Host Support

AspMail provides one host property to set up remote SMTP server addresses. The RemoteHost property should be set to your primary and secondary server’s address separated by semicolons. In the event that the primary server is down, AspMail will attempt to use the secondary server. For example,

Mailer.RemoteHost = "mailhost.localisp.com;mailhost.anotherisp.com"

.