How to send emails in .NET part 1: basics of MailMessage

We’ll look at techniques around sending emails in .NET in this series of short posts.

If your single aim is to send a plain text email with no attachments then it’s very simple. The System.Net.Mail package includes most objects you’ll need for emailing but the following 2 are probably the most important:

• MailMessage
• SmtpClient

You use the MailMessage object to construct the message. Example:

string from = "andras.nemes@company.com";
string to = "john.smith@company.com";
string subject = "This is the subject";
string plainTextBody = "This is a great message.";
MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage(from, to, subject, plainTextBody);

The fields, like “from” and “to” are probably easy to understand.

For sending the message you’ll need a valid SMTP server which is needed for the SmtpClient object:

string smtpServer = "mail.company.com";
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(smtpServer);
client.Send(mailMessage);

This will send the email in a sequential manner, i.e. Send blocks the code until it returns.

SmtpClient.Send has an overload which enables you to bypass the creation of MailMessage entirely:

client.Send(from, to, subject, plainTextBody);

The MailMessage object internally validates the email address so you don’t need to worry about some magic regex string. E.g. the following will throw a FormatException:

MailMessage mm = new MailMessage("helloFrom", "helloTo");

That’s it for starters. We’ll look at emailing in a lot more depth in the upcoming parts.

Read all posts related to emailing in .NET here.