You can't get far in any web language without needing to send emails from your scripts. If you're like me then you create and send emails from scripts all the time.

That's why I find it easier to always have an "email class" in whatever language I'm working in. In the past I've shared a LotusScript email class and a Java email class.

Both of these classes were aimed at Domino, which has its own in-built SMTP server, so all you had to do was call document.Send() and let Domino do the rest. Life is easy with Domino!

With ASP.NET you don't have an in-built SMTP server. You have to rely on an SMTP server elsewhere to send your emails. This could be Microsoft's SMTP service running on the same server or it could be a third-party server running elsewhere. Either way you need to connect a port to it and know the username/password of a user allowed to route email through it.

It took me a while to get my head round the extra complication in sending mails from ASP.NET apps, but as soon as I did I then set about writing a class for C#.

Using the class looks is as simple as this:

Email mail = new Email();

mail.to = "foo@bar.com";

mail.subject = "Your Ticket Has Been Received";

mail.body = "<p>We have received your ticket.</p>" +
        "<p>Your reference number is " + someString + ".</p>" +
        "<p>We'll be in touch shortly...</p>";

mail.send();

Pretty much exactly the same as the Java version. Makes sending email a breeze.

The C# code that allows us to send emails this way looks like this:

using System;
using System.Net.Mail;
using System.Configuration;

namespace ACME.Messaging
{
    public class Email
    {
        private MailMessage m;

        public Email()
        {
            m = new MailMessage();

            m.Sender = m.From = new MailAddress(
                        ConfigurationManager.AppSettings"SendMailMessagesFromAddress".ToString()
                );
                
            m.IsBodyHtml = true;
        }

        public bool isHTML
        {
            set
            {
                m.IsBodyHtml = value;
            }
        }

        public string to
        {
            set
            {
                m.To.Add(value);
            }
        }

        public string from
        {
            set
            {
                m.Sender = m.From = new MailAddress(value);
            }
        }
        public string subject
        {
            set
            {
                m.Subject = value;
            }
        }

        public string body
        {
            get
            {
                return body;
            }
            set
            {
                m.Body = value;

            }
        }

        public void send()
        {
            try
            {
                SmtpClient sc = new SmtpClient();
                sc.Host = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings"SendMailSTMPHostAddress".ToString();
                sc.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network;
                sc.UseDefaultCredentials = false;
                sc.Port = 25;
                sc.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(
                        ConfigurationManager.AppSettings"SendMailSMTPUserName".ToString(), 
                        ConfigurationManager.AppSettings"SendMailSMTPUserPassword".ToString()
                );

                sc.Send(m);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                //Log error somehow
            }
        }

    }
}

It's fairly basic and only caters for plain text or HTML emails (not both) as is. It functions just fine for now though.

There are lots of reference to configuration settings in the code. I keep these values in the Web.config file, which looks a bit like this:

<configuration>
    <appSettings>
        <add key="SendMailMessagesFromAddress" 
                value="Jake &lt;jake@foo.com&gt;"/>
        <add key="SendMailSTMPHostAddress" value="smtp.googlemail.com"/>
        <add key="SendMailSMTPUserName" value="jake"/>
        <add key="SendMailSMTPUserPassword" value="foofoolarue"/>
    </appSettings>
</configuration>

As you can see you can use a Google Mail account to send email. Or you could put "localhost" in the SMTP host address setting and set up a local SMPT server on the same box if you like.  YMMV.