Send Email

Description

The send_email part is used for having your application send emails to users and/or third parties as part of your application's business process and output. 

Use

This is a useful part in applications where the user wants a permanent record of their interaction, a report, confirmation, or outcome sent by email. The send_email part includes functionality for including a customizable subject line, use of variables in the To and CC lines instead of using hardcoded email addresses, and the ability to include interpolated data and/or pdf, doc, xls, csv, and image file attachments in the body of the email.

SMTP Server Requirement

LogicNets-hosted installations must be connected with an SMTP server for email delivery. Our recommendation, especially for email-heavy applications, is to connect with your organization's SMTP service so that you have access to all email logs and you are in full control of the email deliverability, email authentication,  and dealing appropriately with any bounced emails. See the article Email from LogicNets Cloud for more information about this setup or talk to your LogicNets Project Manager. The setup is usually straightforward and handled over the course of a few working sessions with your IT Representatives.

During your initial application development window and until the above is operational, we connect your installation to the LogicNets SMTP server. Please note the recommendations below for ensuring any testing does not interfere with email deliverability.

Tips and Tricks

While it is possible to include inline CSS styling in the body of the email, the way the email recipient sees the styling varies depending on the recipient's email client. To achieve a consistent look and feel for email communications, we strongly advise using file attachments feature instead of styling email body content.

There is no standard "bcc" flag but it would be easy to model the sending of discrete emails to specific people on a list, without them each seeing the other recipients. This construction would typically be placed in a call node and consist of a loop to cycle through each name/email in the "bcc" collection (that would be provided by the user or by lookups in the system. After sending an email to recipient 1, the loop would move on to recipient 2, 3 etc. sending an email each time. Infact, this approach is the recommended one in the case where the distribution list is larger than the Email Distribution Policy Limit - see below. 

Editor Fields

Tab	Field Name	Description/Use	Type/ Options	Mandatory/ Optional
Details	To	You specify the sender of the email in this field.	Data Object/Text	Mandatory
Details	From	You specify the email recipient's address in this field.	Data Object/Text	Mandatory
Details	CC	In this field you can specify email addresses of recipients to which the system should send copies of the email.	Data Object/Text	Optional
Details	Subject	This field is where you  specify the subject/topic of the email.	Data Object/Text	Mandatory
Details	File Attachments	In this field you can enter the data object name of a file to attach to the email when it gets sent to the recipient. You can select the file type and attach more than one attachment to the email. Note: You should not use this field to point to a file on your computer, as the system will look for files available on the server. You can combine the File Upload feature with email to allow users to upload a document to attach to the email.	Data Object/Text	Optional
Details	BASE64 Attachments	In this field you can enter the data object name of a file to attach to the email when it gets sent to the recipient and include the attachment in BASE64 format.	Data Object/Text	Optional
Details	E-mail Body	This field is where you specify the body/message of the email. Note that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standards suggests an absolute maximum of 998 character per line to ensure that mail clients can parse the email message. This is only usually an issue if you are generating HTML code to present a formatted message and using data objects whose contents can be variable. The above issue can easily be avoided by adding occasional line breaks in the email body. More information is available on the internet. Here is an article available on the blogsite Email on Acid.	Data Object/Text	Mandatory
Options	Priority	Using this field, you can set the priority level of the email to high or low. The way this priority displays to the recipient depends on the email provider,  desktop email client, or mobile mail app the recipient is using.	Data Object/Text	Optional
Options	Sensitivity	This field allows you to set the level of importance for an email message. The options are personal, confidential, private, or normal. For messages that have an importance-level set, recipients see a visual indicator in their inbox.	Data Object/Text	Optional

Testing

On-Premise Installations

To use this part in testing an on-premise installation, you will need to have an external SMTP mail server configured. There are several options but one of the simplest ones is called smtp4dev, which is an application that emulates a remote SMTP server on your local machine. Instead of actually sending the mail it catches the email and notifies you. 

LogicNets-hosted Installations

All test emails are sent through LogicNets' standard mail server protocols and are validated against  SPF and DKIM email standards. Any fails or bounces have the potential to impact email deliverability, so we recommend you adopt the following practices:

• Keep test emails to an absolute minimum
• Use the following construction for the FROM email for testing:

"[insert sender name here]" <noreply@logicnets.com>

• Do not use dummy email addresses, such as emailme@abc.com, for recipients

NOTE: Production Applications

In general we expect clients' production applications to require emails sent from the client domain, e.g. noreply@company.com. This requires SMTP configuration in conjunction with the client's IT team to integrate your LogicNets application email output to your own organization's email servers, and should be a planned activity as part of the pre-launch plan. Contact LogicNets for further information on this.

Email and Recipient Policy Limits

When LogicNets hosts your application using our SMTP servers, our policy is that email traffic is limited to:

• A maximum of 100 business application emails. This excludes any LogicNets system-generated emails, such as the password reset that can be requested by users.
• A maximum bounce rate of 5A bounce occurs when the email cannot be delivered because of a persistent issue, such as when an email address doesn't exist.
• Up to 50 recipients per email. This recipient limit is for the combined list of email addresses in the to, cc and bcc fields.
• Metrics are measured over a rolling 24-hour period.

If your application needs to communicate via email to more than 50 people, we can help with alternative modeling. 

Example

Download and import the following example project in your workspace.