Thread: Sending email from PL/pgSQL

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On Wednesday, August 28, 2013 12:39:14 PM Jack Kaufman wrote:
> Would someone provide an example of how to send email from a PL/pgSQL
> function?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Jack


I don't believe you can access anything external to PostgreSQL using PL/pgSQL.
You can create untrusted functions using other languages, though, like PL/Perl
or PL/Python, and use those languages' native libraries to send mail.

I wouldn't actually recommend doing so, though. I would suggest putting the
messages to be sent into a separate table and have an external script poll
that and send the mail as required.

Also, .jar files are for Java or Javascript, and are unlikely to have much to
do with your PostgreSQL installation.

Jack Kaufman <jack.kaufman@sanmina.com> wrote:

> Would someone provide an example of how to send email from a PL/pgSQL function?

You can't do that. Pl/pgsql is a so called 'trusted language', you can't
call functions outside the database. What you can do:

- fill a table with tasks (address, content and so) and use, for
  instance, a cron-job to retrieve data from this table, send the mail
  and delete the record
- use untrusted languages like pl/perlU, pl/sh or other
- use a listen/notify - mechanism to do that

Within a pl/pgsql - function all is in a transaction - but you can't fetch
back an email.


Andreas
--
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely
unintentional side effect.                              (Linus Torvalds)
"If I was god, I would recompile penguin with --enable-fly."   (unknown)
Kaufbach, Saxony, Germany, Europe.              N 51.05082°, E 13.56889°

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On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 9:03 PM, Jack Kaufman <jack.kaufman@sanmina.com> wrote:
> Alan and Andreas,
>
> Thank you!  You both said essentially the same thing:  That I will need to
> write the email attributes to a table and have a script on the server call
> the email client.  So that is the way I will proceed.  Thank you both for
> your replies and for helping me move along toward solving this problem.

Here you can find a very rudimental pl/perl stored procedure that will
send simple emails:
https://github.com/fluca1978/fluca1978-pg-utils/blob/master/bsdmag/03-server-side-programming/15-email-perl.sql

However, depending on the aim of your mail messaging, I would consider
having a shell script fecthing data out of PostgreSQL on a per-cron
basis and arranging a message to pipe thru a mail program (mutt,
sendmail, postfix, whatever). This can be much more general and will
let you reuse the mailing part for other jobs.

Luca

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