Sending email from the database with the Utl_Smtp

Sending email from the database with the Utl_Smtp package

The Utl_Smtp package provides all the primitives required to send email (with character and/or binaray attachments) by making calls from database PL/SQL. The Utl_Smtp primitives are relatively low level, and even a simple task like sending a plain text email with no attachments requires a number of calls. The package maildemo in provides a wrapper around Utl_Smtp.

Note: it uses the Utl_Encode package which is new in Oracle9i. An alternative version of maildemo for Oracle8i is avaiable in This uses an explicit implementation of encoding available in .

The maildemo package presents a higher level API for just such simple tasks making it easy to...

• send a short plain text email with no attachments via a single call
• send a long email in plain text or HTML by...
  • addressing it and setting the message MIME-type
  • defining the message piecewise
• send an email with attachments by...
  • addressing it and setting the message MIME-type to MULTIPART
  • defining the message piecewise
  • adding character attachment(s) with defined MIME-type
  • adding binary attachment(s) with defined MIME-type and encoding scheme
  • stating whether each attachment is to be inline or not
• send an email in a multibyte character set (eg for Chinese, Japanes or Korean)

The maildemo package thus illustrates the use of the lower level Utl_Smtp API. (It uses about half of the available primitives.) It is not however intended to be a complete programmatic equivalent of an interactive email client. Such a package is under consideration, in the first instance for exposure on OTN and then possibly for inclusion in a database release.

The anonymous blocks in and in for Oracle8i illustrate the use of the maildemo API.