ASP.NET – Sending Email Both in HTML and Plain Text
Thursday, February 5th, 2009In this article you will learn how to send email using ASP.NET. Yes, there are plenty of other articles that cover sending email via .NET, but after spending a day doing research, I was amazed at how many articles failed to provide either a correct solution or a real world example. I found that many articles suggest you create your HTML email by using a string with the HTML markup in it. That’s crazy and not at all a real world solution, at least not for most situations. In this article we will look at a more realistic solution. One in which we use a regular HTML file as our template for the email. The template file will be a standard HTML file with the exception of some placeholders that we will use to populate our content and images right before we send the email. Think mail-merge in Microsoft Word. Finally, we will also learn how to send the email in such a way that if the email recipient’s mail-client can’t render HTML they will get an alternate plain text version.
Let’s start by looking at the code in its entirety; the people that just want to grab the code and use it can do so. I will then explain the code.