Purpose

 

This example demonstrates how to use NetMailBot's "Friendly" names parameters to make mails more personable.

 

SMTP allows the specification of "friendly" names in addition to the "normal" email addresses used. For instance, we usually work with cryptic email addresses such as "jsw34@com.state.pa.us" which aren't very personable. If this example is John Walker's address, we can use NetMailBot's -tofriendly parameter to include e.g. "John Walker" in outgoing mail headers. Then when John gets an email from us, he will see that it was addressed to "John Walker" and not just the more cold and anonymous "jsw34@com.state.pa.us". The same idea applies to -fromfriendly.

 

A common mistake is to confuse the parameter specifiers for the -to and -from parameters with those for -tofriendly and -fromfriendly. -to and -from only take "normal" email addresses, thus, something like the following will not work:

 

-from "The Greater Greenville Country Club"

 

-fromfriendly and -tofriendly allow use of such names, and each can only be used together with its "normal address counterpart" - they do not replace the use of normal email addresses.

 

Thus, instead of the above example, we should use something like:

 

-from newsletter@ggcc.org -fromfriendly "The Greater Greenville Country Club"

 

Prepared Example Files

 

 

The archive contains one file:

 

• FriendlyAddressing.bat - The batch file that will instruct NetMailBot to send the email message.

 

Batch File Contents

 

This is the content of the batch file:

 

netmailbot -to test@exclamationsoft.com -tofriendly "ExclamationSoft Test Account" -from test@test.com -fromfriendly "Test-o-matic Corp." -server smtp.yourcompany.com -body "Friendly Test!"

 

Steps

 

1. Unzip the FriendlyAddressing.zip file. This will produce a directory called "FriendlyAddressing". Open this directory.
2. Open Notepad and edit the batch file "FriendlyAddressing.bat". Change the values of the parameters -to, -tofriendly, -from, -fromfriendly, and -server to appropriate values of your choosing and your mail server.
3. Invoke the batch file by double-clicking the icon or straight from the command line.
4. NetMailbot should start up and, upon finishing, the email addresse specified with the -to parameter should  receive an email message with the specified "friendly" names in the header.