EMail SSL Problem in ClaTalk Communication Support

Hi all,

since 2019 many provider dropped TLS < 1.2. (SSL)

Even in the C11 EE (CSP) IDE, you can check SSL and set a port number, but you can’t choose a modern TLS-Version.

So we have to make some workarounds with OLE on Outlook(works fine) or calling external mailclients with RUN() whose parameters are not easyly to handle on larger Mailbodies with special characters.

Any idea, how to get Clarion ClaTalk using TLS 1.2 ?

best regards from Germany

Ralph Rathmann

P.S.: now i added this topic to Clarion Bugtracker with ID 43273

Hi Ralph, I couldn’t find the examples mentioned on the help .\ClaTalk\EmailDemo, (was it distributed separatedly?) but did found SendMail on ClaRunExt.// They are on Examples/Emaildemo directly without ClaTalk container folder.

Some thoughts:

-The enableSSL property as you found out on the IDE prompts is only true/false


on that link you could read also that it uses STARTTLS (explicit TLS - the connection starts unencrypted and then switches to encrypted)

-Some people suggests using ServicePointManager to set the protocol but that would depend on if ClaRunExts could be modified to use it.
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/es-ES/e9e1825a-71a8-487e-9e81-d9c873225e59/smtpclient-esmtp-authentication-and-tls-encryption?forum=ncl


-Some links



  • There is in Clarion another class that manages SMTP, and has example apps too. I suspect it hasn’t evolved and I think it doensn’t do anything SSL related, but perhaps could be combined with OPENSSL.

  • There are also third party tools

Federico

Hi Ralph,

When it comes to networking, unfortunately, the options “in the box” are not ideal. By definition networking involves externalities, and so when those external things change you also have to change to keep up. Sometimes these changes happen slowly, sometimes quickly. (For example the POODLE attack on SSLv3 caused SSL to be deprecated almost instantly and the bulk of the internet dropped it in a matter of days - it was officially killed 6 months later.)

The Clarion release and patch cycle is not typically congruent with fast release cycles. And the “minor” parts of Clarion - like these libraries - don’t get a whole lot of love with each build. So relying on these functions, while convenient (and cheap) in the short term often comes with longer-term consequences.

This is one area where using a more agile 3rd party add-on would be recommended. I’d recommend NetTalk Desktop (obviously) (https://www.capesoft.com/accessories/netsp.htm) - but there’s other options, like noyantis (https://noyantis.com/index.html#Home) and for some networking requirements the free LibCurl (https://github.com/mikeduglas/libcurl).

Hi Bruce,

thank you for making things clearer
and thanks to Federico for your thoughts on this topic.

So i keep on using my own OLE Mailsend Function with Outlook.
My customer sends 100 bills a day with attachements and sometimes mass mailings with > 1000 Mails this way and it works pretty good.

I just hoped to send a simple mail out of the box in some projects.

best regards

Ralph