Scheduling reports to email is among the most popular methods used in BI4.  Recipients can receive reports right into their normal inbox without having to login to the BI4 system itself to retrieve them. So, while email scheduling is very useful, it has a shortcoming, especially when used with modern email servers – it doesn’t support SSL or TLS encryption.

What are SSL and TLS Encryption?

SSL and TLS encryption are two different methods of ensuring that communications between an email client and an SMTP (outbound mail) server can’t be intercepted and read – either the email itself, or perhaps more importantly, login credentials.  This is so important that most SMTP servers won’t accept incoming connections that aren’t encrypted.  This is especially true for externally-hosted email providers like Microsoft’s outlook.com.

Two Strategies

This article deals specifically with BI4 on a Windows server.  However, there are analogous solutions available for Linux…