Project Summary
Many of our web-based and network oriented applications require the capability to send e-mail. Often, company or regulatory policies require that a record of these messages are archived for future retrieval. With the wide variety of development tools (ASP, Java, PHP, JSP, etc.) that MicroWeb uses for developing applications, we sought a standardized way for our applications to send e-mail. This system had to fulfill the following requirements:

• Easy to use with standard development tools
• Failover capability in case of network failure
• Failover capability in case of mail server failure
• Reporting capability of queued, delivered and undelivered messages

Solution
Because the majority of applications that we develop are database oriented, it was natural for us devise of a database solution that could be used by all of our web and netork oriented applications.

The MailOut service monitors a database table at an interval that you specify for new outgoing messages. New messages are automatically sent using the specified outgoing mail server. External applications queue their e-mail by simply adding a record to the MailOut database which is trivial using current development tools.

Because the e-mail messages are stored in a database, reporting can be easily be performed using standard database query tools (Crystal Reports, MS Access, Excel, etc). A web interface allows users to query the MailOut database for queued, delivered, and undelivered messages using a web browser.

Features and Benefits

• Increased Application Performance: application does not need to wait for the mail server
• Increased Application Availability: mail server failure does not stop application operation
• Failover capability when the mail server or network is down
• No installation of mail components is required for each application that sends e-mail
• A record of all e-mail sent is stored and available for reports
• A web interface tool to allow administrators to view all outgoing messages.

Requirements

• Java 2 runtime environment (J2SE)
• JDBC driver for database used as the message store.