So I’ve actually had to do this before for a project I was working on, and thought that I’d go ahead and post a brief example of how to accomplish it here.
This example sends a simple email to a single recipient by using GMail. Please note that the principle classes used (MailMessage, SmtpClient, and NetworkCredential) are only available in the .NET Library 2.0 or later. For .NET < 2.0 you’ll want to see the System.Web namespace.
// Create the mail object.
System.Net.Mail.MailMessage msgMail =
new System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(
"TestEmail@mel-gree.com", // FROM
"mel@mel-green.com" // TO
);
// Set the subject of the message
msgMail.Subject = "Hello from C#";
// Set that the body of this message will be HTML
msgMail.IsBodyHtml = true;
// Set the body of the email. Since I specified that
// I'm using HTML this will be fully qualified HTML/XHTML
msgMail.Body =
"<html>" +
"<body>" +
"<h1>Hello There!</h1>" +
"<p>
You've been selected to receive this email. Congratulations!
</p>" +
"</body>" +
"</html>";
// Now I'll create an SMTP object to send the message
// by means of a SMTP server.
System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient smtp =
new System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient(
"smtp.gmail.com", // Server address
587 // Server port
);
// GMail uses SSL
smtp.EnableSsl = true;
// GMail uses authentication
smtp.UseDefaultCredentials = false;
smtp.Credentials
= new System.Net.NetworkCredential (
"mastermel@gmail.com", // Account Name
"MyPassword" // Account Password
);
// Finally, send the message!
smtp.Send(msgMail);
Here’s a few extra things you might want to know about…