Sending Outlook Email w/voting buttons through a Perl script...

[Kevin B. Pease]

Hi everyone,

I've done quite a bit of Google searching for this, and haven't yet
managed to stumble upon the solution, but I can't help but think there must
be a way to do this. I know it's possible to use ActiveState's perl distro
to send email via the Outlook OLE interface (requiring perl on Windows), but
what I'm looking to do is a little different...

I have a cgi (written in perl) running on a Solaris 8 system (served up
via Apache), from which I'd like to send email to people at my company, all
of whom use Outlook 2000 (or higher). The script is used for submitting
requests to different support groups, and I've received requests to allow
for the inclusion of "voting buttons" (those little buttons in Outlook you
can add to the message that will allow you to respond with a pre-defined
answer) by management to indicate approval / disapproval of various
requests. Can anybody tell me:

a) Is this possible? I assume it must be, although maybe it's not
easy?
b) Does anyone know of any modules that might allow this already?
c) Does anyone know of any other methods that I might investigate
instead?

I know this isn't a "strictly perl" question, but my existing
infrastructure IS perl, and I'd like to accommodate the request by extending
the current infrastructure rather than rewrite the entire thing to work from
Windows just so I can do this.

Thanks,

Kevin Pease

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

via Apache), from which I'd like to send email to people at my
company, all of whom use Outlook 2000 (or higher). The script is used
for submitting requests to different support groups, and I've received
requests to allow for the inclusion of "voting buttons" (those little
buttons in Outlook you can add to the message that will allow you to
respond with a pre-defined answer) by management to indicate approval
/ disapproval of various requests.

I would go about this in one of two ways:

1. Send myself a message that looks like what the management wants. Save
the raw message to examine what it contains. If it is in some well
defined text format, then you can just use that as your message template
using one of the email modules.

2. Instead of "Outlook" buttons, send an HTML formatted message which
links (via graphics that look like buttons) to a CGI script that
authenticates and logs the vote.

Hope this helps.