I know how to mail with telnet (=easy) and I know how to open telnet with VB (via .bat). The problem is I can't put my telnet commands that are in the VB source into the telnet session. Some ideas?

I'm not sure how familiar you are with telnet but htere is a lot of control code that is sent by the client to the server that has nothing to do with the commands. You can't just send commands without the control code. You should either read the telnet IRFC or try to find a telnet API for VB which would simplify a telnet session.

But I think you just want to call the telnet program and inject commands into it, rite? I'm not really too sure about that since I mostly work with Perl, which would be the perfect language for this.

Well, seems to me like you want to send emails via VB right? Even if you don't, this'll still work. Telnet is basically a program that you use to connect to an open port and it just passes raw data back and forth, well, why not just do this in VB? Instead of opening up telnet and sending commands through that, just connect, using winsock, to the server you want to connect to and then send the raw data over the connect urself with VB. You can do anything that you can do in Telnet that way, with any server, because you can just send data like telnet does in VB, so do that, it's faster, more efficient and easier, so read about winsock and any protocols you want to use.

Go with Mornse's plan. As for you mr question mark damienak man... telnet control codes only apply to telnet servers. Not mail servers.

you can use the telnet protocol with the winsock component. use that. i needed email support in one of my programs, so, I just hard coded it there's plenty of info on the net on how to use winsock compenent in vb.