Tutorial: Email in FME Server

As of FME Server 2019+, this functionality can be completed using FME Server Automations. For more information, please see Send email from Automations and Run a Workspace in Response to Incoming Email. Note that this tutorial series will no longer be updated, if you encounter an error, please contact Safe Support.

Getting Started

An overview of email and FME Server

Email is a useful medium for communicating with FME Server, because the technology is ubiquitous, and doesn’t require an installation of any unusual software on the end user’s part. FME Server can both send and receive emails.

A few examples of how email could be used in your workflow:

• Users email in a file containing updates to your database. FME Server validates it, loads it if valid, and sends an email response indicating success or failure, with a log file.
• FME Server emails an administrator if a scheduled job fails.
• Users request custom spatial data via a web form. FME Server clips the data, and emails them a link to it in the projection and format of their choice.

FME Server’s Email Architecture

FME Server’s email capabilities are based on a publication-subscription paradigm:

• Incoming emails are routed by creating publishers. An Email Publisher, for example, has the task of receiving all emails addressed to a specific email account on the server, and publishing their contents as notifications.
• Notifications are messages sent to topics, which you can think of as channels. Their purpose is to accept messages from publishers and release them to subscribers.
• Finally, subscribers deal with all notifications from the topic it is subscribed to. In this tutorial, we will be working with the Email Subscriber. It takes the contents of notifications and sends out an email. The address can be dynamically determined from the content of the notification.
• With FME Server 2018+, sending and receiving emails can be easily done with Automations.

FME Server has a built-in mail server that can receive emails but must make use of another SMTP server to send the email. This can be a webmail provider such as Gmail, or your own internal mail server.

Video

This video walks you through how to configure IMAP and SMTP.

Articles

Configuring FME Flow to Receive E-mail
Explains how to set up FME Server to be able to receive email.

Forwarding email to FME Flow from another mail server
Explains how to set your mail server up to forward to FME Server

Receiving email

Run a Workspace in Response to Incoming Email  (Recommended method for FME Server 2019+)
Receiving email, Part 1: Setting up a topic and an email address
Receiving email, Part 2: Processing email with a workspace
Receiving email, Part 3: Using email attachments

Sending email

Sending emails from Automations  (Recommended method for FME Server 2019+)
Sending email, Part 1: Setting up a topic and an email subscriber
Sending email, Part 2: Sending an email using the FMEServerNotifier
Sending email, Part 3: Sending an email when a workspace completes
Sending email, Part 4: Sending prettier email using HTML
Sending email, Part 5: Sending an email with attachments

Advanced Email Tutorials

Tutorial: Directory Watch
Data Upload, Validation, and Real-time Display