Sending Email from an Application

About Configuring Oracle Application Express to Send Email

Before you can send email from an Application Builder application, you must:

1. Log in to Oracle Application Express Administration Services and configure the email settings on the Instance Settings page. See in Oracle Application Express Administration Guide.

2. If you are running Oracle Application Express with Oracle Database 11g release 1 (11.1), you must enable outbound mail. In Oracle Database 11g release 1 (11.1), the ability to interact with network services is disabled by default. See "Enabling Network Services in Oracle Database 11g".

Sending Email from an Application

You can send an email from an Application Builder application by calling the PL/SQL package APEX_MAIL. This package is built on top of the Oracle supplied UTL_SMTP package. Because of this dependence, in order to use APEX_MAIL, the UTL_SMTP package must be installed and functioning.

APEX_MAIL contains three procedures for sending email:

• Use APEX_MAIL.SEND to manually send an outbound email mess age from your application

• Use APEX_MAIL.ADD_ATTACHMENT to send an outbound email message from an application as an attachment. APEX_MAIL.ADD_ATTACHMENT

• Use APEX_MAIL.PUSH_QUEUE to deliver mail messages stored in APEX_MAIL_QUEUE

Oracle Application Express stores unsent email messages in a table named APEX_MAIL_QUEUE. You can deliver mail messages stored in this queue to the specified SMTP gateway by calling the procedure APEX_MAIL.PUSH_QUEUE.

Oracle Application Express logs successfully submitted messages in the table APEX_MAIL_LOG with the timestamp reflecting your server's local time.

The following UNIX/LINUX example demonstrates the use of the APEX_MAIL.PUSH_QUEUE procedure using a shell script.

SQLPLUS / <<EOF
APEX_MAIL.PUSH_QUEUE;
DISCONNECT
EXIT
EOF