ComposeMessage Method

Compose a new mail message.

Syntax

object.ComposeMessage( From, To, [Cc], [Bcc], [Subject], [MessageText], [MessageHTML], [CharacterSet], [EncodingType] )

Remarks

The ComposeMessage method creates a new mail message, or replaces the current message if one already exists. The following arguments may be passed to this method:

From
A string argument which specifies the sender's e-mail address. Only a single address should be specified. After the message has been composed, the From property will be updated with this value.
To
A string argument ehich specifies one or more recipient e-mail addresses. Multiple e-mail addresses may be specified by separating them with commas. After the message has been composed, the To property will be updated with this value.
Cc
An optional string which specifies one or more additional recipient addresses that will receive a copy of the message. If this argument is not specified, then no Cc header field will be created for this message. After the message has been composed, the Cc property will be updated with this value.
Bcc
An optional string which specifies one or more additional recipient addresses that will receive a "blind" copy of the message. If this argument is not specified, then no Bcc header field will be created for this message. After the message has been composed, the Bcc property will be updated with this value. Note that the Bcc header field is not normally included in the header when the message is exported.
Subject
An optional string argument which specifies the subject for the message. If the argument is not specified, then no Subject header field will be created for this message. After the message has been composed, the Subject property will be updated with this value.
MessageText
An optional string argument which specifies the body of the message. Each line of text contained in the string should be terminated with a carriage-return/linefeed (CRLF) pair, which is recognized as the end-of-line. If the argument is not specified, then the message will have an empty body unless the MessageHTML argument has been specified.
MessageHTML
An optional argument which specifies an alternate HTML formatted message. If the MessageText argument has been specified, then a multipart message will be created with both plain text and HTML text as the alternative. This allows mail clients to select which message body they wish to display. If the MessageText argument is not specified or is an empty string, then the message will only contain HTML. Although this is supported, it is not recommended because older mail clients may be unable to display the message correctly.
CharacterSet
An optional integer value which specifies the character set for the message text. The default is for the message to be composed using the standard US-ASCII character set. One of the following values may be used:
Value Constant Description
1 mimeCharsetUSASCII The default character set using US-ASCII which defines 7-bit printable characters with values ranging from 20h to 7Eh.
2 mimeCharsetISO8859_1 An 8-bit character set for most western European languages such as English, French, Spanish and German. This character set is also commonly referred to as Latin1.
3 mimeCharsetISO8859_2 An 8-bit character set for most central and eastern European languages such as Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian. This character set is also commonly referred to as Latin2.
4 mimeCharsetISO8859_5 An 8-bit character set for Cyrillic languages such as Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian.
5 mimeCharsetISO8859_6 An 8-bit character set for Arabic languages. Note that the application is responsible for displaying text that uses this character set. In particular, any display engine needs to be able to handle the reverse writing direction and analyze the context of the message to correctly combine the glyphs.
6 mimeCharsetISO8859_7 An 8-bit character set for the Greek language.
7 mimeCharsetISO8859_8 An 8-bit character set for the Hebrew language. Note that similar to Arabic, Hebrew uses a reverse writing direction. An application which displays this character should be capable of processing bi-directional text where a single message may include both right-to-left and left-to-right languages, such as Hebrew and English.
8 mimeCharsetISO8859_9 An 8-bit character set for the Turkish language. This character set is also commonly referred to as Latin5.
EncodingType
An optional integer value which specifies the content encoding to use for the message text. The default is for the control to use 7-bit encoding. If an 8-bit character set is specified for the CharacterSet argument, the default encoding type will be set to quoted-printable. One of the following values may be used:
Value Constant Description
1 mimeEncoding7Bit Each character is encoded in one or more bytes, with each byte being 8 bits long, with the first bit cleared. This encoding is most commonly used with plain text using the US-ASCII character set, where each character is represented by a single byte in the range of 20h to 7Eh. Most e-mail messages are composed using 7-bit ASCII.
2 mimeEncoding8Bit Each character is encoded in one or more bytes, with each byte being 8 bits long and all bits are used. 8-bit encoding may be used with multi-byte character sets, although this encoding type is uncommon in e-mail messages. It is recommended that quoted-printable encoding be used for 8-bit character sets.
4 mimeEncodingQuoted Quoted-printable encoding is designed for textual messages where most of the characters are represented by the ASCII character set and is generally human-readable. Non-printable characters or 8-bit characters with the high bit set are encoded as hexadecimal values and represented as 7-bit text. Quoted-printable encoding is typically used for messages which use character sets such as ISO-8859-1, as well as those which use HTML.

Return Value

A value of zero is returned if the method was successful. Otherwise, a non-zero error code is returned which indicates the cause of the failure.

Example

The following example composes a new message:

    nError = MailMessage1.ComposeMessage(editFrom.Text, _
                                         editTo.Text, _
                                         editCc.Text, _
                                         editBcc.Text, _
                                         editSubject.Text, _
                                         editMessage.Text)
    If nError <> 0 Then
        MessageBox MailMessage1.LastErrorString, vbExclamation
        Exit Sub
    End If

See Also

Bcc Property, Cc Property, Encoding Property, From Property, Recipient Property, Recipients Property, Subject Property, Text Property, To Property


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