regarding receving mails

[shailendra]

can anybody tell me how to recieve mails

[pwoneill]

I think you need to be a bit more specific :)

[shailendra]

look u can send a mail
from dbms_smtp package
but i want receive any mail
so there any way to receive mails
tell me it is urgent

[pwoneill]

Oracle can be used to send mail with the package you mentioned.

What do you need to recieve mails for? If it's just normal e-mail you can use whatever client program your email provider uses (outlook, pine, etc).

If you mean that you want to set up an account so Oracle can check it with a stored procedure or something, then off the top of my head I couldn't tell you how to do it.

You might be able to connect to the mail server using utl_tcp but you'd need to research the protocol and how to fetch mail from the servers.

You could try having some other program (maybe procmail can do it, or plain old mail) spool the mail to a file when it's recieved and reading it from Oracle that way.

If there's an easier way I don't know about it, maybe someone else does.

[denevge]

Maybe iFS is what your are looking for ??

I know iFS can read from POP3. Using the iFS definitions of a file type ( written in java ) you can then do lot's of things with it.

Hope this helps
Gert

[shailendra]

thanks denevge as well as pwoneill

denevge will u pls explain me something about iFS
that what is this and how it works
thanks again

[shwa]

shailendra-
what platform are you running on? if you're on a *nix you could pretty easily write a shell script that parses an email messages (that meet a criteria?) and uses an at document to insert the message into a table via sql*plus or svrmgrl and run it periodically via a cron. parsing email can get kind of complicated quickly so it's best to keep your methods here simple.

[denevge]

What's iFS, the oracle new features documentation says :

Oracle Internet File System (iFS)
Oracle iFS combines the power of Oracle8i with the ease of use of a file system. Completely integrated with Oracle8i, the Internet File System is a Java application that runs within the Oracle8i Java Virtual Machine. It enables the database to become and Internet development and deployment platform.

Oracle iFS makes it possible to treat the database as if it were simply a shared network drive. Users can store and retrieve files managed by the database as if they were files managed by a file server. Because iFS supports a variety of standard protocols, users have universal access to their data. Whether a user accesses the contents of iFS through Windows Explorer, a Web browser, an FTP client, or an e-mail client, the files appear the same.

Not only can relational data appear as files, but hybrid documents that combine relational and non-relational data into single objects can be created and viewed. Files and folders in iFs are stored in a repository. They are indexed on content and file properties, allowing for intelligent text searches and queries.

From a developer's standpoint, iFS is the single data store containing the data for many different applications. For the system administrator, iFS provides a single system for file storage and messaging, rather than several separate systems to maintain and administer. In short, iFS is a simpler way of storing different types of files in the database.

More specific to your case.

You could make some jave procedures to process your incoming mail.
You retrieve you mails from POP3 into the iFS. iFS looks at the extention of what has been put in, and automatically starts the corresponding java procedures.

If you want to do it the UNIX-way, you can use "fetchmail". It's a free program you can download and install. It fetches mail from an SMTP-mail server and puts it in the unix mailbox.
Then, you can write some scripts to process those mails.

Hope this helps
Gert