Sending Email via Vision software

[Jhav]

All,

I was wondering what email servers work with the vision software. 

[Flex727]

Servers without encryption. I'm not sure there are any that still exist.

[kratmel]

This link to Help center maybe useful

https://support.unitronics.com/index.php?/selfhelp/view-article/VisiLogic-Gmail-to-Gmail

 

In Unitronics invitation to webinar i found this

• Cybersecurity: Vision & Samba Controllers - Unitronics enables Cybersecurity throughout its product range. Join us to learn how you can best protect your system from external threats with Vision and Samba Controllers.
  July 12th at 10:00 ET | 14:00 GMT  Register Here

[Jhav]

Thank you for the response. I will try Gmail.

[Ausman]

I haven't tried it with any Vision equipment, but Google does  have an innate method for less secure devices to communicate with gmail.  It's not well known, but the method is that the google system generates a specific password just for that device, ie it isn't the normal login for the account in use.  I had some printers that were being blocked and they are still working fine to this day.  Stupidly I did not write up the procedure...kicking myself....but it was fairly easy to step through the process once I had "learned" things.  The learning was definitely a bit of trial and error!  I recall that the biggest hurdle was having to use the device concurrently with being logged in to the account via PC etc...I think that fairly quick timeouts applied for entering the info.

I think that my starting point was here:

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833#zippy=

and the reference to an "app" is initially confusing, as it isn't an app as such.

Again, I don't know whether it works with Vision or not, as I haven't needed it, and at present don't have time to trial things.  If someone else has success, please write it up.

cheers, Aus

[ZK0]

At our plant, we use a C# script to communicate with the PLC over IP and monitor memory locations in order to trigger an email. I wasn't the responsible party, but if you're interested I can get the programmer to leave a comment here with more details. 

[Jhav]

ZKO,

I would be interested in seeing that process if you wouldn't mind.

 

[Oath]

Jhav,

Regarding ZK0's answer, we've been using the C# Communications Driver ( https://www.unitronicsplc.com/Download/SoftwareUtilities/unitronics_communication_driver_for_dot_net.pdf ) for most of our monitoring events. We basically poll the memory locations we're interested in about once every second (using the plc.ReadWrite() function) and make decisions or log data from these events. From our experience it can be a somewhat finicky connection, requiring a fair bit of robustness in the program (verifying returned array sizes, type-checking on receipt of your data, a way to handle a communication disconnect, etc), but you can actually end up polling the PLC very rapidly and discard any funky-looking data (for example, if it reads a value that might trigger an email alarm, have it check the next value to see if you're still in an alarm state to mitigate false-positive readings).  Once you're collecting the data you're interested in, you can use MimeKit in C# to generate emails in varying formats, including maybe a logfile attachment, and then use MailKit to securely connect to an email service you have available to send a secure email.

 

If you're interested in looking further into this solution, I do have a handful of wrapper functions to simplify my life of interacting with the PLC functions that does a lot of my checking for me on data reads - just let me know!