Sending an instant play audio file to a Lotus Notes e-mail address?

November 6, 2013 12:03 PM

I need to e-mail a small audio file to my office in such a way that it automatically plays as soon as the e-mail is opened by the recipient. Can this be done and, if so, how? I can embed the audio into a graphic if necessary or create it in any format. The file wouldn't be larger than maybe 1MB. My office uses Lotus Notes v8.5 mostly on PCs but also a few Macs. Thanks in advance.
posted by Jamesonian to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Many anti-malware defenses are designed to prevent exactly this sort of auto-execution of content, since the method could be used to exploit vulnerabilities in the media player or other helper-app for the purposes of spearphishing. Can you not send a link to a page where the content pops and plays instead?
posted by jquinby at 12:15 PM on November 6, 2013 [4 favorites]

No. Mail programs won't do this, because if they did, you'd be getting spam that plays sound all the time. Nobody wants that so the only way to play sound attached to an e-mail is for the user to explicitly play it.
posted by kindall at 12:30 PM on November 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: As bad of an idea as it is to support auto-playing audio in email, it looks like at least some email clients (mostly Apple Mail and iOS Mail) do support it through the HTML5 <audio> tag. I do not think it works in Lotus Notes 8.5 though. Oddly enough it looks like the only multimedia email technology Lotus Notes supported recently was Java Applets, and even that support was dropped in version 8.
posted by burnmp3s at 2:25 PM on November 6, 2013

I think the more important question is: wait, people are still using Lotus Notes?

... and +1 to burnmp3's answer - I endure Notes and looked into doing something similar although our corporate Notes version is even more locked down.

One thing I do like about Notes is pretty robust support for animated GIFs - perhaps go with that instead of audio?
posted by tkbarbarian at 8:51 PM on November 6, 2013