Processing Incoming Mail

You can manually process Adaptive Server incoming e-mail queries.

Call the ESPs xp_findnextmsg, xp_readmail, and xp_deletemail individually for each message.
Use xp_sendmail to execute the query in each message and send the e-mail results back to the requestor.

However, using sp_processmail invokes these ESPs automatically.

sp_processmail reads and responds to unread messages in the Adaptive Server inbox. You can determine which messages to process by passing a value for the originator parameter, the subject parameter or both.

Selecting Messages by Sender or Subject
When You Specify	sp_processmail Processes
`originator`	Only mail from the specified sender
`subject`	Only mail with the specified subject header
`originator` and `subject`	Only mail by the specified sender with the specified subject header
Neither `originator` nor `subject`	Unread mail in the inbox

sp_processmail uses default parameters when invoking xp_sendmail, but you can override the dbname, dbuser, and separator defaults by passing these values to sp_processmail. For the syntax for sp_processmail and xp_sendmail, see the Reference Manual: Procedures.

This example processes all the unread mail sent to Adaptive Server by the e-mail sender “admin”:

sp_processmail @originator = "admin",
@dbuser = "sa", @dbname = "db1"

The procedure executes the queries in the db1 database in the System Administrator’s context and returns the results an e-mail attachment to “admin” and to all the copied and blind-copied recipients of the original incoming message.