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You can have your workflow notifications delivered to you as e-mail messages if your notification preference is set to 'Plain text mail', 'HTML mail with attachments', 'HTML mail', or 'Plain text mail with attachments' in the User Preferences web page and your workflow administrator sets up a notification mailer to run.

If your e-mail reader can only support plain text messages with no attachments, set your notification preference to 'Plain text mail'.

If your e-mail reader can interpret and display HTML-formatting in the body of a message, select 'HTML mail with attachments' or 'HTML mail' as your notification preference. HTML mail provides direct links to supporting information sources that you may need access to to complete a notification. If you choose 'HTML mail with attachments', the e-mail messages include links to the Notification Detail page as standard attachments. If you choose 'HTML mail', the e-mail messages do not include these standard attachments. If custom attachments have been defined for individual notifications in a process, however, those attachments will still be included.

An HTML-formatted notification can also include an option for you to request more information about the notification from another user before you respond, if the notification is defined to allow such requests. See: #HIDE_MOREINFO Attribute, Oracle Workflow Developer's Guide.

If your e-mail reader can only display plain text in the body of a message, but can also display attachments to the message, set your notification preference to 'Plain text mail with Attachments'.

An e-mail notification that requires a response maintains an 'Open' status until you respond to the notification. For e-mail notifications that do not require a response, such as FYI (For Your Information) notifications, your workflow administrator determines how the notification status is updated when setting up a notification mailer. Depending on the setup configuration, either Oracle Workflow automatically updates the status of FYI notifications to 'Closed' after sending you the notifications by e-mail, or those notifications maintain an 'Open' status until you manually close them in the Notifications Worklist web page.

Once you read an FYI message, you can delete it from your inbox. However, if the notification mailers for your organization are set up to keep FYI notifications open after sending them by e-mail, you must also use the Worklist to manually close the notification, even if you have already deleted the notification message from your e-mail inbox. See: To View Notifications from the Worklist.

There are two response methods for plain text e-mail notifications: templated response or direct response. Your workflow administrator determines the response method for your organization when setting up a notification mailer. For the templated response method, you reply using the template of response prompts provided in the notification and enter your response values between the quotes following each prompt. For the direct response method, you enter your response values directly as the first lines of your reply.

Both templated and direct response e-mail notifications are based on standard message templates defined in Oracle Workflow Builder. Both describe the syntax the reply should follow and list the information needed to confirm the notification. See: Modifying Your Message Templates, Oracle Workflow Administrator's Guide.

When you respond to a notification by e-mail, your reply message must include the notification ID (NID) and access key from the original notification message. Notification mailers can process your response properly only if you include the correct NID and access key combination in your response. You can ensure that your reply contains the NID and access key either by including the entire original message in your reply or by using a response template that includes the NID line.

Note: The notification access key is a distinct random key generated by the Notification System for each NID. The access key serves as a password that allows only users who actually received the notification containing the key to respond to that notification.

The format of the NID line is as follows:

NID[9999/999999@XXXXXX]

Some mail clients, notably early releases of Microsoft Outlook Express, may not copy the NID line properly in a reply message. When responding to a notification, you should verify that the NID line is included in full and contains the prefix NID and all the details between the square brackets.

See Also

To Respond to a Plain Text E-mail Notification Using Direct Response

To Respond to an HTML E-mail Notification

To Respond to a Plain Text E-mail Notification with an HTML Attachment

To Reassign a Notification to Another User

Setting Up Notification Mailers, Oracle Workflow Administrator's Guide

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