Sending e-mail from ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 was very easy. It
is still easy with ASP.NET 2.0 - assuming you know the new class names. I am
not sure why Microsoft changed these classes; certainly there is a reason, I
just do not know it yet.
The System.Net.Mail class is what replaced the
System.Web.Mail class. There are a number of classes within this class and it
was not exactly clear to me at first what was needed to send e-mail. I messed
with a number of the classes trying to Dim a New object and then set properties
to the way I am used to doing it, but no combinations I tried would work.
What I did find was the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient class
which has a method named Send. Rather than setting properties and calling this
method, I just wound up passing the values I wanted into this method - doing
all the "real" work on a single line.
One property that you do need to set before calling Send is
the Host property, so the class knows where to send the SMTP e-mail for delivery.
I will not bore you with the simple form I created to test
this. I had four textboxes: "EmFrom" for the sender email address, "EmTo"
for the email address I am sending to, "EmSubj" for the subject of
the email, and "EmMsg" for the body text of the email.
These three lines do all of the work:
Dim MailObj As New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient
MailObj.Host = "localhost"
MailObj.Send(EmFrom.Text, EmTo.Text, EmSubj.Text, EmMsg.Text)
The above assumes you are using the local SMTP service on
the machine where this code is running. You can also specify a remote host,
but I do not know (yet) how to authenticate against a remote host with
SMTP-Auth (which most SMTP hosts are running now).
Hopefully this will help someone else and save them the time
that I spent digging into this. If anyone reading this understands the value
of all the other System.Net.Mail classes, please either send the feedback to me
and I will write something up or put it in an article for the rest of us to
see.
Editor's Note - You can also set
your mail settings in your web.config, as this Scott
Guthrie blog entry demonstrates.
Happy coding!
