Roman's Weekly SQL Server Tip - Better way of sending email from SQL Server (XPSMTP)

Roman's Weekly SQL Server Tip - Better way of sending email from SQL Server

"If you've ever used SQL Mail to send email messages from T-SQL, you probably know how painful it is to get the whole thing up and running. One of the reasons is that both SQL Mail and SQL Agent Mail rely on MAPI, forcing you to go through a complicated setup process, including having to install Outlook on the SQL Server machine and creating an Exchange profile. Another problem is that MAPI is not reliable on SQL Server clusters and this scenario is actually not supported by Microsoft."

Yeah, I've disliked MS SQL's email feature for forever... the most reliable email system I've used is to use a command line program (blat) to send emails. And that's just doesn't feel right.

"...I recently discovered that Gert Drapers, a member of the SQL Server team, wrote an extended stored procedure called xp_smtp_sendmail that allows you to easily send SMTP mail from T-SQL code. You can use it with both SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 but they are implemented as separate DLLs. You can download the xp_smtp_sendmail stored procedure from Gert's SQLDev.net website. The setup is very easy, just drop the dll to the binn folder and run sp_addextendedproc to register the extended procedure with SQL Server. Gert's site provides very good documentation and sample code to get you up and running very quickly. ..."

Very cool...

As I wrote this post, it really started to sound familar!

sigh... Time to search my blog.

LOL. Guess what I found.
http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2004/05/xpsmtp-smtp-emails-from-sql-server.html

Well I guess if it was cool last year, it's still cool now... :0