This is the solution for all those who are forced to send an email every day, every week or every month to the same people. For example, in the workplace, you are often forced to send a daily or monthly report to your boss with the activities carried out, an e-mail always the same of which maybe only the content changes.
It can take a lot of time to send an Excel sheet with data inside, a log file if you are working in the IT sector, a report or two simple lines of confirmation or notification.
I have worked in companies where I have seen not only secretaries but also office managers and consultants spending half their time making and copying and pasting emails to be sent, always the same and always with the same attachment, albeit updated.
If you want to fight inefficiency but, above all, you want to gain precious time to finish the job earlier, then it can be useful to know how you can send programmed automatic emails, free of charge from your computer .
In short, in order to avoid making mistakes when you have to write an email, just make one and automate the sending as needed, every day at the same time, every week or every month, without having the risk of forgetting about it.
Blat is a command line utility that sends emails using the SMTP or NNTP protocol .
The command line application is different from a graphical interface (GUI) and can scare less experienced users.
In GUI programs, there are buttons and boxes for entering details, but from the command line, everything must be typed in one line.
However, I can assure you that, once the initial negative impact is overcome, there is no technical difficulty and, once you are used to seeing and reading the commands, everything becomes simple.
1) After downloading Blat, the archive must be unzipped and the files that are in the full folder must be moved to C: / Windows / system32 .
This allows you to run the blat.exe command without having to specify paths but you can also copy it to a different folder.
2) From the Start menu, type the cmd command on the search box (or running Windows XP).
On Vista and Windows 7 you may need to go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories, right click on the command prompt and select Run as administrator .
3) If you now try to write blat the basic instructions to use the command appear.
If an "invalid win32 application" warning should come up or if it is not found, then specify the full path c: \ windows \ system32 \ blat
Basically, to send an email to any email address, you need to write the command with these parameters:
blat.exe -f -to -subject Title -body message -server smtp.server.com:25 -u User_name -pw password
The SMTP server specified by your e-mail provider should be used.
To give an example with the three most used mail services in the world, we have:
Yahoo mail: smtp.mail.yahoo.it
Gmail: smtp.gmail.com
Hotmail: smtp.live.com
Those with which you access your e-mail address must be entered as username and password .
By putting the data right, it will already be possible to send an email from the command line, from your Email address, which will be received immediately.
To these standard parameters are added many others that can be seen by writing the command blat / ">).
To send an email, you can also send the contents of a txt test file, putting the -bodyF followed by the path and the name of the .txt file in place of the -body parameter.
The received message will not contain attachments but will have the text that was written in the txt file as the content of the Email.
If you want, you can save a sender profile so that you no longer have to rewrite every time all the login, password and SMTP server parameters.
It is needed to write:
Blat -SaveSettings -f Default_Email -smtp_server server -u username -pwd password
If the port of the SMTP server is different from 25 (the standard one), then the -port parameter must be added.
The same thing can be done using blat -install -server_smtp server -f email_address -u username_pwd password
Using Blat you can schedule the sending of the email so that it is sent automatically on set days always to the same recipient.
To do this you can use the Windows Scheduled Tasks function found in Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Scheduler .
From here you can create a basic task and specify to run the command C: /Windows/sstem32/blat.exe by indicating the parameters in the " Add arguments " box.
From this planning on Windows 7 you will notice that you can send a programmed Email message using the convenient graphical interface (but I think Outlook needs to be installed).
If you set a txt file as the body of the message, you can send an Email to scheduled sendings but with different texts.
Whoever receives a message sent by blat, does not notice in the least that it was generated by an automatic script.
Alternatively, you can also create and schedule the execution of a batch file .
Just copy the syntax used to run the blat command from the command prompt into a new text file and rename that file by changing the extension, from .txt to .bat .
I realize that in this article I had to remain very concise and perhaps unclear but it is not possible for me to do a lesson here on the use of the DOS command line so, for any question, the comments remain available.
In another article, how to delay an Email for scheduled sending with Outlook.
