Something I've always wanted to do is improve how I send (HTML) emails from LotusScript. While I have the core code pretty much nailed down the way I use it has always been a bit cumbersome and not very flexible.

So, I took the time yesterday to write an Email class. This is how I now send an HTML email:

Dim mail As New Email()
mail.Subject = "Hello"
mail.setText "Here is a link:" + Chr(10)+link
mail.setHTML {<p>Here's a <a href="}+link+{">link</a><p>}
Call mail.Send("foo@bar.com")

The Email class handles creating the document, MIME headers, Streams, HTML wrapper tags etc etc and just leaves it for you to set the subject, content and recipient's address.

Optionally you can specify who the sender should appear as by passing a three element array (name, email address, Notes domain), like so:

mail.Sender = Split("Foo Bar, foo@bar.com, DOMAIN", ", ")

You can also specify the ReplyTo and/or BlindCopyTo addresses if you wish.

The code for the class is as below:

Scratch! This code was way too buggy. See tomorrow's post for an updated version

Feel free to offer any suggestions for improvement. I'm no class-writing expert and won't be offended. Consider the above a very rough version 0.1. I've not decided yet what the easiest way to implement it is.

Right now I don't like how setTextPart has to be called before setHTMLPart. Seems an odd requirement to put on the coder just because it's a requirement of the class.

Note that you can just use setText or setHTML if you don't want to write the email twice, which is what you need to do in order to satisfy people with non-HTML email clients. You can send text or HTML only emails. It's just not good practice though!