Sample Email Messages

The following samples show what types of messages can be sent using the Email control.

Example 1: HTML Body, No Attachments

If the supplied String body is an HTML document, you can set the content-type annotation attribute to generate the following e-mail.

To: user@myorg.com
Subject: Thanks for your order
Content-Type: text/html

<html>
<head>
<title>Thanks for your order</title>
... 

Example 2: Body with Attachments

For a message body with attachments, the Email Control generates a multipart/mixed message with the message body as the first part. Attachments are added as MIME parts with content types in accordance with their file name suffix. The following table lists commonly used file suffixes.

Suffix
Content-Type

.doc

application/msword

.gif

image/gif

.html

text/html

.jar

application/java-archive

.jpg

image/jpeg

.pdf

application/pdf

.txt

text/plain

.xls

application/msexcel

.xml

application/xml or text/xml

.zip

application/x-zip-compressed

Attachments with unknown extensions receive the application/octet-stream MIME type. The Email control also base64 encodes attachments which include binary data, as shown in the following example:

To: user@myorg.com
Subject: Thanks for your order
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="------------F141E40DDE2763DF92513DD4"

------------F141E40DDE2763DF92513DD4
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Dear Sir,

Please see the attached diagram and brochure.

Thanks,
Customer Service

------------F141E40DDE2763DF92513DD4
Content-type: image/jpeg; 
        name="picture.jpg"
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="picture.jpg"
Content-transfer-encoding: base64

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAgAAZABkAAD/7AARRHVja3kAAQAEAAAAPAAA/+4ADkFkb2JlA
...

------------F141E40DDE2763DF92513DD4
Content-Type: application/pdf;
        name="brochure.pdf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: inline;
        filename="brochure.pdf"

JVBERi0xLjIgDSXi48/TDQogDTEwIDAgb2JqDTw8DS9MZW5ndGggMTEgMCBSDS9Ga
...

------------F141E40DDE2763DF92513DD4
 

Example 3: No Body, One Attachment

An Email control send action with no body and one attachment does not generate an multipart/mixed message. This supports interchange scenarios that require the XML document to be in the message body.

To: inbox@myorg.com
Subject: new XML order
Content-Type: application/xml

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<PurchaseOrder>
... 

Exceptions and Errors

You can use an exception handler to catch and deal with any exceptions that are thrown by the Email control.

If one or more of the To or cc recipients is determined to be invalid by the local mail server, an exception may be thrown immediately. However, if the invalid recipients can only be detected by the destination mail server, this is out of the scope of the Email control. We recommend that the From address be a mailbox for handling messages bounced back to the sender.

If one or more of the attachment file names is not found, an exception is thrown.

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