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Use the SMTP Email VIs to send electronic mail, including attached data and files, using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). LabVIEW does not support authentication for SMTP. You cannot use the SMTP Email VIs to receive information. The SMTP Email VIs use the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) format to encode the message. In this format, you can send multiple documents, including binary data files, within an email. You also can describe properties of the individual attachments, such as which character set a text document uses.

Note  The SMTP Email VIs are available only in the LabVIEW Full Development System and the LabVIEW Professional Development System.

In addition to the recipient(s) email address, you must know the Web address of the SMTP server. You specify a mail server by wiring a mail server to every SMTP Email VI you use. The mail server must be the host name or IP address of an external server computer that can service requests from the computer running the SMTP Email VIs. If you do not know which mail server to use, contact your network administrator for the name of a valid server. After you specify a valid mail server, the SMTP Email VIs open a connection to the server and send the server commands that describe the recipients and the contents of the email. The server sends the message to the individual recipients or forwards it to other SMTP servers. Refer to the labview\examples\comm\smtpex.llb for examples of using the SMTP Email VIs.

Character Sets and UTF-8 Encoding

LabVIEW supports 8-bit Unicode Transmission Format (UTF-8) character encoding in email messages. UTF-8 is a lossless, variable-length character encoding scheme that uses groups of bytes to represent characters from many languages worldwide. The following VIs support UTF-8 encoding:

• SMTP Email Send Message
• SMTP Email Send Data
• SMTP Email Send File
• SMTP Email Send Multiple Attachments

These VIs convert a string message, encoded in the system's character set, to UTF-8 format before sending the email. This conversion allows you to send email messages that a wide variety of operating systems can read.

Note  The SMTP Email Send Message (Small) VI uses the US-ASCII character set and therefore does not support UTF-8 encoding.