Emailing Web Order Confirmations

You might remember a thread on the listserv a few months ago regarding emailing confirmations to customers for their orders. TIMSS6 has this as base function, however I didn't like the fact that is sends confirmation for all orders when I just wanted to send them for orders that came in through the web (customers expect this).

I found an article on how to send email from SQL Server using xp_smtp_sendmail. Following the steps in the article, I created a stored procedure in my database that emails confirmations for orders with a method of WEB. Then I used the SQL Server Agent to schedule a task to execute that procedure every couple minutes.

The xp_smtp_sendmail has a couple nice features, including changing who the email is from and allowing an HTML message.

I also added a table to the TIMSS database to store the messages that were sent.

Applies to: TIMSS5, TIMSS6, Personify