SNDSMTPEMM NOTE Limited to 400 Characters

Question

I am trying to get our iSeries 6.1 machine to send email through our Exchange server. I can do it with SNDDST and with SNDSMTPEMM, but both are very limiting. I need support for basic HTML, and for PDF attachments. I thought I could get them both from SNDSMTPEMM, but now I see that the body parameter for SNDSMTPEMM (NOTE) is limited to 400 characters. Is it possible that this command allows 10 attachments but less than a paragraph of text?

I would like to know if anyone is using this command, and if I am missing something about it that would allow me to create an actual email message.

If indeed I can't put more than 400 characters into the body of an email with this command, I have read about MMAIL and MAILTOOL and I am curious if anyone knows if this message length restriction exists for those as well?

It will be a very hard sell for our main programmer to install any third-party anything to get this working, so I would love to be able to do it with SNDDST of SNDSMTPEMM (or some other built in I haven't found yet).

I don't currently need to be able to send to multiple recipients, but I do need to be able to attach a couple of attachments (where SNDDST fails for me). I also can't use attachments with an *LMSG.

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this kind of post - I find it very difficult to find the right place.

Answer 1

The SNDSMTPEMM command is indeed limited to 400 characters in the message body, according to the documentation.

Where I work, we still mainly use MMAIL, which used to be free but now requires a $50 "donation" (and lots of hoops to jump through just to register). It doesn't have that message length limitation. It comes with several commands for ease of use, and a service program for more fine-grained control over how the message is built. Once you download it, you have access to the source, so you can really muck around with it if you have to. (The donation also allows you to download a multitude of other utilities from Easy400.net.)

A better but more expensive option is Bradley Stone's MAILTOOL. It's still competitively priced, as far as commercial IBM midrange software goes. If you go that route, it's probably worth getting the Plus! add-on, which side-steps IBM's native SMTP, a recurring source of headaches. (MMAIL and the basic MAILTOOL rely on native SMTP.)

The best place for this kind of post, at least for now, is the Midrange-L mailing list at midrange.com. When it comes to AS/400, iSeries, and IBM i stuff, that community is currently much more active than Stack Overflow, and they welcome open-ended discussion and "what do you recommend?" posts, which are discouraged here. You can find some discussion on the command you mentioned, and some alternatives, in this thread.