Dynamic Emailing With Microsoft's CDOSYS

Typical Client Requirements
Firms often need to contact clients and vendors during regular worflow processing. Increasingly, the world is turning to email as the primary form of business communication. Microsoft servers ship with a powerful utility, called Collaborative Data Objects System (CDOSYS) that is cable of combining email message elements such as Subject Line, To, From, Body, Etc. and sending a resulting email request to an available emailing system. This can be Microsoft Exchange or it can just be another server component, an SMTP server service.

Solution Scenarios
The CDOSYS tool can be accessed and addressed from Stored Procedures, applications and even web pages. Threfore, it opens the door to automating standard process steps requiring customer and/or vendor contact. As I've developed my solution, there are libraries of reusable compoents and a semi-structured way in which emails can be compiled. There are dynamic recipient lists, one that might only include those customers who are late in paying their invoices. Another reusable element is a data-aware salutation that formats date, name, title, addresss, and a "Dear ..." clause. Another reusable element is used as a footer and lists all of the participants of a project along with phones and email addresss. The sky is the limit with where this can go. Not only is this fast and accurate, but it logs each run including for whom the process may have failed.

Another important aspect of our batch email activities is managing bounces. We are able to harvest them out of Outlook and maintain a running count of how many times each email has bounced. This then allows us to see for whom we do not seem to have a valid email address so that we can reach out to them by phone or mail to update their records. When we process our bounces, each message in the isolated inbox is evaluated by our open architecture email rules to identify which are meaningless auto-replies, which are spam, which are challenge requests, which are true replies and which are failed-attempt bounces. We've been running this for about four years.