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## Step 10 Implementing the Notification Mailer

The Notification Mailer is a program that performs e-mail send and response processing for the Oracle Workflow Notification System. You need to perform this step only if you wish to have your workflow users receive their notifications via e-mail, as well as from the Notifications Worklist web page. The Notification Mailer polls the database for messages that have to be sent, and performs the following action for each message:

- Resolves the recipient role to a single e-mail address, which itself can be a mail list.

- Switches its database session to the role's preferred language and territory as defined by the directory service.

- Generates the message and any optional attachments using the appropriate message template.

- Sends the message via UNIX Sendmail or any MAPI-compliant mail application on Windows NT.

The Notification Mailer also processes responses by interpreting the text of messages mailed to its response mail account and calling the appropriate notification response function to complete the notification.

The e-mail notifications are based on standard templates defined in Oracle Workflow Builder. The templates describe the syntax the reply should follow and list the information needed to confirm the notification. The generated e-mail message also includes any custom site information, the due date, and any information necessary to process the response. See: Modifying Your Message Templates.

Once you set up the Notification Mailer to run, it continually polls the database for messages to send and checks its response mail account for responses to process. You do not have to do anything else unless you have a need to shut it down and restart it again with different parameters.

> Attention: The Notification Mailer will shut itself down if a database failure is encountered or if the PL/SQL package state for the session is invalid due to dropping or replacing of package definitions. If you are using the standalone version of Oracle Workflow, you can restart the Notification Mailer manually or run a shell script that restarts the Notification Mailer if it ever exits with a failure. See: To Run a Perpetual Shell Script for the Notification Mailer. If you are using the version of Oracle Workflow embedded in Oracle Applications, you can use the concurrent manager to restart the Notification Mailer program manually or schedule it to restart periodically.

Context: You need to perform this step only once.

See: Full MIME Support

See: Notification Preferences

See: Plain Text E-mail

See: HTML-Formatted E-mail

See: Plain Text E-mail with an HTML Attachment

See: Starting the Notification Mailer

See: Response Processing

See: Reviewing Notifications via Electronic Mail

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