Adding attachments to vmailer

I use Informatica on a Windows platform, which means I've become pretty good at writing DOS Batch scripts. I'm not a huge fan of this, mind you, but I do what I have to in order to solve the problems I face.

One such problem involves sending an email for error notification from within a Batch file. You know - you've got a Batch script which SFTP's to a remote server to pick up a file from a vendor, file doesn't exist (or is zero bytes in size) and then your job happily processes nothing. Bad idea. So, you need some sort of validation so that you can know to intervene before the client angrily calls you.

One program I've found that I like a great deal is called vmailer.exe. It's a freeware, command line email utility. It's about a simple a program as you'll find (you get what you pay for), but for what I need, it works perfectly.

Except that the documentation is extremely limited, and the website's own FAQ is particularly useless.

By default, vmailer works as follows:
c:\vmailer.exe

V-Mailer v1.2.1 (www.virdi-software.com)

Usage: VMailer.exe Filename SmtpServer To From User Password

where:
FileName = text file containing the messsage
SmtpServer = server name or ip address e.g. smtp.domain.com
To = recipient's address e.g. him@domain.com
From = sender's address e.g. me@domain.com
User = (optional) user name if authentication required
Password = (optional) password if authentication required

Most of this is pretty self-explanatory. The user/password at the end I've never used. So, that leaves just 4 options. The second one might involve an email to your sysAdmin to ask what the exchange server is. If you know where to find this, you can dig through Outlook and get this information as well. The To and From are the email addresses, and I'm pretty sure you can put whatever you want in the From line.

That leaves the "filename". In its simplest form you could put something like this in your filename:
"Hello world"

That would show up in the body of your message. But your Subject line would be blank. The vmailer FAQ is helpful in solving this problem, however, and suggests you need to do some formatting of your filename in order to get a subject line in there. This suggests that there is some intelligence in this file, and it's not merely the contents of your email body.

That gives us something a bit more complex:
From: Curtis
To: Valued Recipients
Subject: This is a Subject line.

This is a test.

That's better! Now we get a subject line. And a bit more power over the "To" and "From" which you can play with if such things amuse you. (they do me)

But most recently, I wanted to be able to add an attachment to the file. This proved harder, and the web proved particularly unkind to me in solving this dilemna. I did find a good site which finally revealed a simple solution, but I had to dig and dig for it, which is why I decided to put it here for my own sake, if not for the sake of others trying to find similar information.

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain ; name="test_20100505.csv"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="test_20100505.csv"
From: Curtis
To: Valued Recipients
Subject: This is an Attachment Test

This is a test.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I know what all of that stuff means exactly, but I do know that there are multiple content-types, and if you google "MIME content-types" you can get a list of all the types out there that a MIME email accepts.

Obviously, this is a bit outside the scope of Vmailer, since at this point we're talking about MIME, and no longer about vmailer. But if you're like me, you enjoy simple solutions. :)