E-mailing from filepro

[Fairlight]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 09:09:50AM -0700, Bob Rasmussen may or may not have
proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> 
> Most to the point, you don't want to send plain text emails for utility 
> bills. You probably want to adapt your current layout, which is probably 
> printed on a pre-printed form using either plain text or some printcodes. 
> 
> Our Print Wizard product will let you do all this; that is, take your 
> existing filePro output, translate it, add an overlay image, and email it. 
> See website for details, email or call me for specifics.

You raise an interesting point, Bob--although not the one you were trying
to make.

Ignoring the "prettification" or "company format" factor for a moment,
what you said got me thinking about how bills are usually laid out, and in
thinking about the formatting, also about what goes in them.

Which leads me to point out that sending full bills via an unsecure channel
like email isn't necessarily the best idea in the world in this day and
age.

Most places (banks, utility companies, etc.) will do one of two things.
Some will provide an alert email that your bill is ready, containing a link
to your bill on their web site, which you must log into in order to view
the bill.  Others will provide a bill that's redacted to the point that
identity theft isn't (as much of) an issue.

But if, say, one was putting out bills with a person's name, address, and
something like a SSN or account number, then you're in the realm of
personally identifying information.  That shouldn't be passed through
insecure channels, and email then becomes a poor choice.  If that kind of
combined, identifying information is necessary for the bill (or just part
of the standard bill), then it's time to look at redacting, or doing a
"come to us" scenario with an SSL-protected web site and email alerts
combined.

That said, PrintWizard is a great choice for doing PDFs for either
solution.  And, having considered the scenario a bit more, I toss you a
feature to maybe implement...  Give PrintWizard the ability to set security
settings, including PDF passwords and restrictions, all from the command
line.  If one could at least password protect the PDF, it would be a
different story.  Granted, this assumes that people have signed up for an
account ahead of time (which I'm not sure is the case in Rich's scenario)
and gotten a password assigned.  But in scenarios where a pre-existing
password/account had been generated, the ability to pull and use that
information when generating PrintWiz-made PDF files would be stellar.  I
actually don't know of a CLI utility that has that functionality, either.
The ability to set this stuff on the fly might give you a leg up in the big
picture.

At any rate, there are security/privacy concerns involved with emailing
bills.

mark->