Email Connection

Email connection allows you to send and receive email messages.

Email connection can send email messages in two ways:

Using an SMTP server - A message created by SMS Studio is sent directly through an SMTP server. In this case, you should supply standard parameters needed to logon to the SMTP server.
Using a pickup folder - A message created by SMS Studio is placed in the pickup folder. If an SMTP service is installed on the computer, it can automatically pick up a message and send it to its destination.

Email connection receives messages by connecting to a POP3 email server.

The contents of this topic:

Sending emails
Receiving emails
Email Connection Dialog

Sending emails

Email connection uses the outgoing message from the Outbox to compose the email message.

The sender and recipient email addresses are specified in the Sender and Recipient fields. You can use the following message parameters to compose the address: %MsgFrom%, %MsgTo%, %MsgText%, %MsgID% and %MsgHexID%. For example, you can use %MsgTo%@domain.com to create an email address which includes the phone number of the recipient.

You can either enter the email address only, or the name under double quotes followed by the email address under angle brackets. For example, this field can be either mike@domain.com or "Mike" <mike@domain.com>.

The text of the outgoing message may contain a number of parameters separated by vertical line ( | ). The meaning of the parameters depends on the selected Compose type setting which may be either Simple or Advanced.

When the Simple compose type is selected, the outgoing message should contain the subject of the email message as the first parameter, and the rest of the text of the outgoing message will be used as the text of the email message. Either subject or text or both may be overridden, in which case the overridden part will not be extracted from the text of the outgoing message.

For example, if a message from the Outbox contains the following text:

Your account balance | Balance: 120 credits

then an email messages would be sent with the subject line "Your account balance", and the text "Balance: 120 credits".

When the Advanced compose type is selected, the text of the outgoing message should conform to the following syntaxes:

Template | Param1 | Param2 | ... | ParamN

The email connection will use the specified file as the template for the email message. Optional parameters param1, param2, ... and paramN will be used to replace all occurrences of %P1%, %P2%, ... and %PN% in the template file.

For example, if you have already prepared an email message and stored it in the template folder under the name balance.eml and that message contains the following text:

Your account balance is %P1% credits.

then you can send the account balance information by using the following text in the Outbox message:

balance.eml | 120

Note that the Template parameter may contain either relative or absolute path to the file. If the path is relative then the template folder setting is used to resolve the location of the file.

Receiving emails

SMS Studio connects to a POP3 server at regular time intervals to collect new email messages. Note that the collected email messages are removed from the server after reception.

Incoming email messages are then converted to incoming SMS messages by using the From, To and Text formats, which may contain the following text parameters:

%Phone% - The phone number found in the subject or the text of the email message.
%PhoneSubject% - The phone number found in the subject of the email message.
%PhoneText% - The phone number found in the text of the email message.
%PhoneFrom% - The phone number found in the sender of the email message.
%PhoneTo% - The phone number found in the recipient of the email message.
%From% - The name and the email address of the sender of the email message.
%FromName% - The name of the sender of the email message.
%FromEmail% - The email address of the sender of the email message.
%To% - The name and the email address of the recipient of the email message.
%ToName% - The name of the recipient of the email message.
%ToEmail% - The email address of the recipient of the email message.
%Subject% - The text contained in the subject of the email message.
%Text% - The text of the email message.
%FileName% - The full path and the file name of the file in which a copy of the email message is saved.
%CRLF% - A pair of <CR> and <LF> characters.

SMS Studio tries to detect and extract the phone number from the incoming email message. The first array of at least 6 digits, optionally preceded by the international prefix ( + ) and separated by white spaces, dashes ( - ), slashes ( / ), dots ( . ) or parentheses, is considered as a valid phone number.

For example, if you use put %Phone% to From format and %Text% to Text format, then you can receive emails with a phone number in the subject line. If an email message like this arrives:

Subject: My phone number is +12 (34) 56-789
Text: It's simply great that I can chat by using email!

SMS Studio will place a new message in the Inbox, which would appear as if it was sent from the phone number +123456789, containing the text It's simply great that I can chat by using email! By using this technique, you can even send back an SMS message to the sender as a reply to his email.

Email Connection Dialog

See Connection Dialog for description of the Connection, Account and Options tabs.

Login tab

User name lets you enter your user name.
Password lets you enter your password.
Remember password allows you to specify if the application should remember your user name and password. If this option is not checked, the application will ask you for the user name and password each time you initiate the connection.

Receive tab

POP3 Server address specifies the network name or the IP address of the POP3 server.
Port specifies the port number to use for connecting to the POP3 server.
Collect every lets you specify the time interval at which the application will collect new email messages.
Ignore messages larger than lets you specify that messages larger than the specified size should be ignored. These messages will not be removed from the email server.
Read at most n first lines specifies that only first n lines of incoming email messages should be read. Any additional lines will be ignored. This options can speed up the connection by ignoring unnecessary contents of the incoming email messages.
Receive messages using formats lets you specify the formats used for creating the Inbox messages from email messages.
Save email messages to folder lets you specify the folder where the copies of received email messages will be stored. Use selection button ( ... ) to select a folder. Note that if the Read at most n lines option is used, the contents of the email messages may not be saved completely.
Local IP address lets you specify the local IP address SMS Studio will use when connecting to the POP3 server. This setting is useful if you need to select the network adapter to be used by this connection, or if your network adapter is using several IP addresses. In most cases, there is no need to change this setting (i.e. it should be set to 0.0.0.0).
Do not remove collected email messages from server lets you specify whether SMS Studio should leave the messages on the server upon collecting. Note that by using this option messages will be collected again each time new collecting occurs.

Send tab

Send emails using SMTP server lets you specify that you wish to use an SMTP server to send email messages.
Server specifies the SMTP server address used to send email messages.
Port specifies the port number to use for connecting to SMTP server.
Server timeout specifies how long to wait for a response from the SMTP server before stopping an attempt to send a message.
Server requires a secure connection (SSL) specifies whether to use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security protocol when connecting to the server.
Server requires authentication specifies whether the SMTP server requires authentication.
Send emails using pickup folder lets you specify that you wish to use a pickup folder for sending email messages.
Folder lets you select a folder to be used as a pickup folder. Use selection button ( ... ) to select a folder.

Compose tab

Sender lets you specify the email address that would be set as the sender of email messages.
Recipient lets you specify the recipient email address.
Compose type lets you select the compose type to use when composing an outgoing email message. You can choose between Simple and Advanced compose types.
Override subject lets you override the subject of email message. This setting can be used with the Simple compose type when you do not wish to extract the subject from the text of the message. This field allows using the %Text%, %From%, %To% and %CRLF% parameters to embed the fields from the message from the Outbox.
Override text lets you override the text of email message. This setting can be used with the Simple compose type when you do not wish to extract the text from the text of the message. This field allows using the %Text%, %From%, %To% and %CRLF% parameters to embed the fields from the message from the Outbox.
Template folder lets you specify the folder where the email template files are stored. Use selection button ( ... ) to select a folder.
Delete template file when successfully sent specifies whether to delete the template file used to send the message after the message has been successfully sent. This is useful when template files are dynamically created for each outgoing email (for example, by an external application).