Introduction
A very common and extremely useful functionality in Web Developement is sending emails from a Web Application. Some of the very common purposes of sending emails from a web application are, to send feedback to the webmaster of a site or informing a forum member of new post in a thread they subscribed - like Go4Expert, the list is never ending.
In the .NET Framework the task of sending an email is made very easy. In order to send an email message we need to use the
SmtpMail class found in the
System.Web.Mail namespace, which contains a static method
Send.The simplest way to send an email message is to call the
Send method passing an instance of the
MailMessage class, the
MailMessage class is also found in the
System.Web.Mail namespace and it represents an email message.
Creating a MailMesaage
The
MailMessage class contains properties very similar to CDONTS (the frequently used component used in ASP to send mails).Such properties include: To, From, Cc, Bcc, BodyFormat, Subject, Priority, Body, etc. So, to send an email, we should create an instance of the MailMessage class and set its properties.
'Create an instance of the MailMessage class
Dim oMM as New MailMessage()
Code:
'Set the properties
oMM.To = "deepz@go4expert.com"
oMM.From = "sam@go4expert.com"
'If you want to CC this email to someone
oMM.Cc = "naveen@codingforums.com"
'If you want to BCC this email to someone
oMM.Bcc = "pallav@globaldevelopers.net"
'Send the email in text format
oMM.BodyFormat = MailFormat.Text
'(to send HTML format, you need to change MailFormat.Text to MailFormat.Html)
'Set the priority - options are High, Low, and Normal
oMM.Priority = MailPriority.Normal
'Set the subject
oMM.Subject = "Hello there!"
'Set the body - use VbCrLf to insert a carriage return
oMM.Body = "Hi!" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf & "Sending an Email from ASP.NET"
Note: You will need to import the System.Web.Mail namespace in your ASP.NET Web page in order to be able to utilize the above code, like this: <% @Import Namespace="System.Web.Mail" %>
Sending the MailMessage
Once we have created the
MailMessage class instance with all the required properties, sending the email message is a piece of cake. We just need to call the static method Send in the
SmtpMail class, passing the
MailMessage class instance.
Code:
' Send the message, using the Send method of the SmtpMail class
SmtpMail.Send(objMM)
The
SmtpMail class uses the SMTP Service built into Windows 2000 to do the work of actually sending the email message. By using the
Send method above, the local SMTP server is used to send the email message. In order to specify a different SMTP mail server to use to send the message, set the
SmtpServer property:
Code:
SmtpMail.SmtpServer = emailServerNameorIP
Be careful, though. Since this is a static property, changing this value in one ASP.NET Web page will affect all ASP.NET Web pages using sending emails via the
SmtpMail object. That is, if in one ASP.NET Web page you set the
SmtpServer property to myNewMailServer, and then, in another ASP.NET Web page, do not specify the
SmtpServer property, intending to use the default SMTP server, myNewMailServer will be used instead. For that reason, you should probably always specify the
SmtpServer property - if you want to use the default SMTP server, simply do:
Code:
SmtpMail.SmtpServer = ""
