How to send emails in .NET part 11: credentials

In the previous part in this mini-series we looked at how to handle exceptions. We’ll briefly look at authentication in this post.

Some SMTP servers require you to provide a username and password in order to send emails.

You can set the default network credentials as follows:

string smtpServer = "mail.blahblah.com";
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(smtpServer);
client.UseDefaultCredentials = true;

Another way to achieve the same is the following:

client.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;

…where CredentialCache is found in the System.Net namespace.

You can also set the username and password manually as follows:

client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("name", "password");

Read all posts related to emailing in .NET here.