Everything about sending Emails in ASP.NET 2.0- Part 4

Introduction

In Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series we learnt to send text, HTML and Multipart emails from ASP.NET 2.0. Up till now we always used the virtual SMTP server of IIS to send our emails. In many real world cases you may need to send the messages from your own SMTP server. This article will tell you how to use your own SMTP server while sending emails. Further, we will see how to send emails asynchronously.

Configuring SMTP Host

The SmtpClient class that we used to send emails has several properties that allow us to configure the SMTP Host. SMTP host is a server that you use for sending email messages. The following table lists some of the important properties and methods of the SmtpClient class.

Example - Sending emails asynchronously via remote SMTP host

Let's develop a web form that allows us to specify HOST information in addition to normal From, To, Subject and Message. You will find the complete source code for download along with this article. In the code behind of the web form you will see the following code:

...
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient();
client.Host=TextBox7.Text;
NetworkCredential credentials = 
new NetworkCredential(TextBox8.Text, TextBox9.Text);
client.Credentials = credentials;
client.SendCompleted+=new 
SendCompletedEventHandler(client_SendCompleted);
client.SendAsync(msg, null);
...

Here, we first create an instance of SmtpClient class. We set its Host property to the remote SMTP server's name or IP address e.g. mail.somedomain.com. We then create an instance of NetworkCredential class and pass the host user name and password to it. These details are required by the SMTP host for authenticating the sender. We then set the Credentials property of SmtpClient class to this instance.

In this example we want to send the email message asynchronously and hence we will be using SendAsync() method. We also want to get a notification when the send operation is complete. We achieve this by handing the SendCompleted event of SmtpClient class. The event handler of this event can be any function (client_SendCompleted in our example) that accepts two parameters:

• First parameter of type object indicating the object that triggered this event
• Second parameter of type AsyncCompletedEventArgs. This class gives you access of the state information passed during send operation (see below).

We finally call SendAsync() method by passing two parameters:

• The email message to be sent
• An object indicating the state information being passed to the SendCompleted event. In our example we pass null but it could have been any valid object

Our SendCompleted event handler function looks like this:

private void client_SendCompleted
(object sender, AsyncCompletedEventArgs e)
{
lblMsg.Text = "Mail sent successfully!";
}

In the event handler we simply display a success message in the event handler.

Summary

Email sending has become more advanced and flexible in ASP.NET 2.0. In this series we discovered how to create messages, embed images and configure SMTP host to send emails from ASP.NET applications. Though we used ASP.NET for building our client applications you can very well use Windows Forms or console applications instead.