Comment On The Trials and Tribulations of Programmatic Email

Wow...  he knows CDONTS...  he knows Interop...  Did he think Microsoft just forgot to add a built in email feature?

I think the best part is the
"Go back to the drawing board" part.

back in the day - i made a C++ program to send emails from a database table.

 

made some good dough selling to people who couldnt find the internal packages. (not that they were all that good back then anyhow).

Why would microsoft go through all of the trouble building a System.Web.Mail  namespace anyways.  I mean, who really uses email?

5th post i hope (my favorite number)

I'd say he was coming from a Unix background (each program does one task, does it well, and provides a simple interface for other programs to work with), except that 1) Outlook hardly "does it well", and 2) he never installed Sendmail on the server.

Alex Papadimoulis:

Someone with absolutely no .NET programming experience would take a few minutes on Google, and then reply "SmtpMail class in System.Web.Mail."

Unlikely. This is the first hit for "programmatically send an email .NET":


How to send e-mail programmatically by using System.Web.Mail in Visual C# 2005 or in Visual C# .NET

so why should it take a few minutes?

How can some one be so...
How can someone go through such big efforts to get anything done and not stop to think that there might be other ways?
It starts to sound so normal that I get scared thinking that I might do something like this some day...

nhaaaaaaaa :p

Bus Raker:

5th post i hope (my favorite number)

Sorry pal, the first post somehow went astray, so your post is actually the 4th.

So wait, they tried all that before trying to write a SMTP class from scratch?

.NET whiz = Cheez Whiz

Or System.Net.Mail if you are using 2.0

Alex Papadimoulis:

2004-12-07 16:22 -- Install, on the server, a newly purchased program called ClickYes that automatically clicks "Yes" to those dialogs.

This was the part that made me literally drop my jaw.

I'm just going to assume this person had or has zero clue that SMTP exists.

Anonymous:

How can some one be so...
How can someone go through such big efforts to get anything done and not stop to think that there might be other ways?
It starts to sound so normal that I get scared thinking that I might do something like this some day...

nhaaaaaaaa :p

Sometimes, it does not help.  There might not be a predefined way to do it.  It happens often enough that some estimate that there is less effort in doing it oneself instead of hunting for something that does not exist.

HOWEVER, these days, with the Web and particularly, for something as common as E-mail, yes, this is a programmer WTF.

Another related thing is the fuss made over an invention.  Someone discovers a great way of doing something, crows about it, maybe gets kudos for making it go right, and does not understand why the old-timer is not impressed.   The reason for the last is that the discovery is old hat.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Anonymous:

Or System.Net.Mail if you are using 2.0

Good. I was about to say that "the Real WTF" was the package naming on MS's part...

The web is just what some upstart at CERN did for a summer project. The 'net, and its other applications, predate it by quite some decades...

So when some spyware app or whatever causes a prompt to install, the wonderful programmer(cough cough) just helps it along.  Brillant!  I guess security never entered his mind........

Ken

I want to know how anyone makes money on a product that clicks yes. Do they offer a ClickNo? ClickMaybe? ClickBrillant?

Strange... I thought that SmtpMail used CDONTS

In reply to many posts at once:

This guy was a self-though old-timer
Nobody after was impressed of what he did
Everybody have some "funny" story about this guy anyway

But... the ClickYes also made my jaw go wild.

I sent something else from that programmer to Alex, left to see if it's coming or not ;)

neven:

So wait, they tried all that before trying to write a SMTP class from scratch?

If he wasn't able to look through the .NET documentation, I don't hold out much hope for him to find/read/understand RFC 821/2821.

Anonymous:

neven:

So wait, they tried all that before trying to write a SMTP class from scratch?

If he wasn't able to look through the .NET documentation, I don't hold out much hope for him to find/read/understand RFC 821/2821.

I meant, by writing void SendMail() that calls an outside application that implements the needed SMTP calls.

Anonymous:

I want to know how anyone makes money on a product that clicks yes. Do they offer a ClickNo? ClickMaybe? ClickBrillant?

It cost $39.90, see http://www.contextmagic.com/express-clickyes

I think an ClickNo application is an unfilled market niche which probably could sell for much for than $39.90, since it's often harder to say no to things than yes.

It really would have been far simpler to open a socket and start talking SMTP.  It's really quite easy!

neven:

I meant, by writing void SendMail() that calls an outside application that implements the needed SMTP calls.

Who needs an outside application? Just fetch a few tens of thousands of bucks, port the application to Oracle and let UTL_SMTP do the job.

Of course, the underlying WTF here is that the library is System.Web to send email. What if I want to send email from a Windows Forms application? System.Web has no business in that app.

Alex Papadimoulis:

2004-12-02 14:07 -- Deploy to the server and learn that it doesn't work so well. Go back to the drawing board.

2004-12-03 12:39 -- Deploy to the server and learn that, because it is Windows 2003, it does not have CDONTS installed. Go back to the drawing board

Obviously the "former .NET whiz" did all he could. The problem was with the drawing board.

>BiggBru

Straight from Yahoo search for ClickYes:

Anonymous:

I want to know how anyone makes money on a product that clicks yes. Do they offer a ClickNo? ClickMaybe? ClickBrillant?

how about ClickIsVeryNull?

The best part is that ClickYes has a ClickYes Pro v2.2 Serever Use License

No, I'm not kidding. It really is a Serever Use License.

Volmarias:

Alex Papadimoulis:

2004-12-07 16:22 -- Install, on the server, a newly purchased program called ClickYes that automatically clicks "Yes" to those dialogs.

This was the part that made me literally drop my jaw.

I don't know which I find harder to believe, despite obvious evidence to the contrary:

- that such a product exists, or

- that someone would seek out such a product as the solution to his "problem"



Also, doesn't this guy test his code before checking it in?

ammoQ:

Bus Raker:

5th post i hope (my favorite number)

Sorry pal, the first post somehow went astray, so your post is actually the 4th.

actually he is fifth, he used to be sixth, considering the first post is the WTF itself

Anonymous:

ammoQ:

Bus Raker:

5th post i hope (my favorite number)

Sorry pal, the first post somehow went astray, so your post is actually the 4th.

actually he is fifth, he used to be sixth, considering the first post is the WTF itself

True, but why do people keep posting "first post" when they are actually 2nd, since Alex is 1st all the time?

He sounds like an old-school VB programmer being reluctantly dragged in the .net world. (And before he knew VB, he was most comfortable putting .bat files together.)

2004-12-02 14:07 -- Deploy to the server and learn that it doesn't work so well. You may want to find out why.

I have never tried to send an email from my own code, and had no idea that some languages actually had build-in libraries for this stuff. That said... mmm.... trying to open an external GUI app and trying to enter stuff that way... that just seems like the wrong way to go...

Anonymous:

Anonymous:

I want to know how anyone makes money on a product that clicks yes. Do they offer a ClickNo? ClickMaybe? ClickBrillant?

how about ClickIsVeryNull?

ClickIObject


the true wtf is that the captcha is a word I will sometimes use as a password.....seriously

cconroy:

Volmarias:

Alex Papadimoulis:

2004-12-07 16:22 -- Install, on the server, a newly purchased program called ClickYes that automatically clicks "Yes" to those dialogs.

This was the part that made me literally drop my jaw.

I don't know which I find harder to believe, despite obvious evidence to the contrary:

- that such a product exists, or

- that someone would seek out such a product as the solution to his "problem"

What I just love is that ClickYes is blantantly sold as something working around a security feature "because it's annoying": http://www.contextmagic.com/express-clickyes/

Version 2.2.1. I'm tempted to download it just in the hope that the change log is included, to see how they could make so many revision of that thing.

It even got an API: http://www.contextmagic.com/express-clickyes/free-version.htm

This is depressing.

no doubt this is the type of guy who will later post msgs on .NET newsgroups that

1. complain about how .NET is so lacking in functionality that he was forced to buy a third-party "Yes" clicker to interface with Outlook

or

2. upon learning about System.Web.Mail, will complain about how .NET is too complicated, gee whiz how is anyone supposed to learn the thousands of classes?  "I just want to solve real world business problems, waaah"

Congratulations to the developers of ClickYes.   I didnt realize there could be a profitable niche for supporting WTF developers!

Could this be the program he used: http://www.contextmagic.com/express-clickyes/?  What a horrible way of implementing email....

Anonymous:

Strange... I thought that SmtpMail used CDONTS

 

It uses CDONTS if it is on an OS less than XP, if it is XP or Server 2003 it uses CDOSYS.

 

That is exactly the program he used.

Volmarias:

Alex Papadimoulis:

2004-12-07 16:22 -- Install, on the server, a newly purchased program called ClickYes that automatically clicks "Yes" to those dialogs.

This was the part that made me literally drop my jaw.

Wait, what if the program attempts to add an attachment, and outlook pops up a "File Not Found" [OK] dialog - maybe Paula will be called in to redefine YES for the ClickYes program ...

Maxim, i would like to see the other samples from this fellow.  I would imagine his data access code starting off like:

1. programmatically execute MSACCESS.EXE....

I'm guilty of rolling my own email library in .NET instead of using the built in. (Well, I heavily modified another's email library anyways). The only reason I did this was because the built-in functionality, at least in v1.1, does not allow you to send a stream as an attachment. Instead it only allows you to attach paths to the filesystem. From my digging it seems that this is actually a limitation of CDO, which System.Web.Mail uses.

Anonymous:

How can some one be so...
How can someone go through such big efforts to get anything done and not stop to think that there might be other ways?
It starts to sound so normal that I get scared thinking that I might do something like this some day...

An excellent question.  The answer is that computer science has
long taught us to learn to do each and every low-level thing
ourselves.  While that is valuable for the learning process, it is
the opposite of effective professional development and it's directly
contrary to OO development, where you're supposed to treat other
objects (and people) as opaque and trust them to do their respective
jobs.



In general, if one starts thinking, "I can't believe Sun/Microsoft
didn't bother doing X," then either they did it and you don't know
about it, or they avoided doing it for a damn good reason.  It's
not that they're especially smart;  it's that they have a lot of
help in the form of a lot of outside contributors.

Installing Sendmail would be a big fat WTF.

It would have been the perfect closer though.

2004-12-08 01:12 -- ClickYes 2.2.12 is buggy. Instal cygwin, built m4, built sendmail, installed sendmail, piping email to sendmail. Will probably work.

I saw an enterprize access application that used ClickYes on the server to get around some macro security messages. i don't which is the bigger WTF, since there is an option to disable to the messages in the tools menu..

VGR:

In general, if one starts thinking, "I can't believe Sun/Microsoft
didn't bother doing X," then either they did it and you don't know
about it, or they avoided doing it for a damn good reason.  It's
not that they're especially smart;  it's that they have a lot of
help in the form of a lot of outside contributors.

Sometimes they really didn't do it, for no obvious reason...

Anonymous:

I saw an enterprize access application that (snip)..

Seems like an oxymoron to me.

While executing Outlook.exe is stupid, I've used SMAPI to send e-mail from C and VB programs. Using SMAPI you can send attachments and send intra-company e-mails through Exchange and IMAPI servers. Turns out that SMAPI and MAPI uses Outlook, so you get that stupid message box (stupid because viruses and bulk e-mails do not use SMAPI or MAPI anymore). To top it all, Outlook Express (the one that comes with Windows) has a configuration to disable the message box but the full Outlook that comes with Office has not.

Oh yes, and the customer moved on from Exhange to Lotus Notes who has its own API for sending e-mails!