July Code Blog: Sending mail in ASP .NET

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Sending mail in ASP .NET

Author: xiaoyu | Posted at: 2:53 PM | Filed Under: .NET

Sending e-mails from a website is very common nowadays, especially while registering on a website, an automated e-mail will be sent to your mailbox for verification and confirmation purpose.

ASP .NET simplified the work of developers with the introduction of a namespace called System.Web.Mail. By using this namespace, developers can easily sending a plain text mail, HTML mail, or sending attachments.

Sending Plain Text Mail
Let’s start with a simple plain text mail first. See the codes below.

using System.Web.Mail;
.
.
.
string To = "youremailaddress@yahoo.com";
string From = "webmail@mail.com";
string Subject = "Hi";
string Body = "Hello World!";

SmtpMail.Send(From, To, Subject, Body);

The output of this will look like the screenshot below.

This is very simple since it only uses SmtpMail.Send method in the System.Web.Mail namespace. SmtpMail.Send method contains 4 parameters: From, To, Subject and BodyText.

Sending HTML Mail
In sending a HTML mail, we need to use MailMessage class, which provides a lot of useful properties. Here is a list of the properties:

Attachments - Used for sending e-mails with attachments
From - Sender’s email address
To - Recipient’s email address
Cc - Recipient’s email address (Carbon Copy)
Bcc - Recipient’s email address (Blind Carbon Copy)
Body - Text of the email address
BodyFormat - Format of an email (Text or HTML)
Priority - Priority of an email (High, Low, or normal)
Subject - Title of an email
Headers - Denotes a collection of acceptable headers (E.g. Reply-To)
BodyEncoding - Method of encoding an e-mail message (Base64 or UUEncode)

Below is a sample code for sending a simple HTML mail.

using System.Web.Mail;
.
.
.
MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();

mail.To = "youremailaddress@yahoo.com";
mail.Cc = "ccemailaddress@yahoo.com";
mail.From = "webmail@mail.com";
mail.Subject = "Hi, another mail from me";
mail.BodyFormat = MailFormat.Html;

string strBody = "<html><body>Hello World " +
" A HTML mail</body></html>";
mail.Body = strBody;

SmtpMail.Send(mail);

The output of this will look like the screenshot below.

Sending Attachments
As you already seen in the list of MailMessage properties, by sending an attachment, you can use the Attachments property. See the codes below.

using System.Web.Mail;
.
.
.
MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();

mail.To = "youremailaddress@yahoo.com";
mail.From = "webmail@mail.com";
mail.Subject = "Attachment from me";

mail.BodyFormat = MailFormat.Text;
mail.Body = "There is an attachment!";
mail.Attachments.Add(new MailAttachment("c:\\Test Message.doc"));

SmtpMail.Send(mail);