Quick and Easy: Send Email Using Gmail SMTP Server in .NET C#

This isn’t exactly a new topic, but when I needed to do it, I found a lot of “why won’t this work for me” and not too many direct answers.  I hope someone finds this useful.

The following bit of code will send an email using my own gmail account to do it, including attachments:

using System.Net.Mail;
using System.Net;

NetworkCredential loginInfo = new NetworkCredential("[My Gmail ID]", "[My Gmail Password]");
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage();
msg.From = new MailAddress("[M Gmail Id]@gmail.com");
msg.To.Add(new MailAddress("paul.galvin@arcovis.com"));
msg.Subject = "Test infopath dev subject";
msg.Body = "<html><body><strong>A strong message.</strong></body></html>";
msg.IsBodyHtml = true;

foreach (string aFile in NIPFD.GetAttachmentNamesAndLocations())
{
    msg.Attachments.Add(new Attachment(aFile));
} // Adding attachments.

SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com");
client.EnableSsl = true;
client.UseDefaultCredentials = false;
client.Credentials = loginInfo;
client.Port = 587;
client.EnableSsl = true;
client.Send(msg);

 

A few key bits that slowed me down and other observations / notes:

  • The first line that creates the loginInfo object needs to use the gmail ID stripped of “@gmail.com”.  So, if my gmail email address is “sharepoint@gmail.com” and my password is “xyzzy” then the line would look like:

NetworkCredential loginInfo = new NetworkCredential("sharepoint", "xyzzy");

  • My gmail account is set up to use SSL and that wasn’t a problem.
  • There is some conflicting information out there on what port to use.  I used port 587 and it worked fine for me.
  • In my case, I also needed to send attachments.  That NIPFD object has a method that knows where my attachments are.  It’s returning a fully path (e.g. “c:\temp\attachment1.jpg”.  In my test, I had two attachments and they both worked fine.

I used visual studio 2008 to write this code.

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2 thoughts on “Quick and Easy: Send Email Using Gmail SMTP Server in .NET C#

  1. Jeff

    The PowerShell Team blog recently had a similar post that I found invaluable as a server admin. Visual Studio is great but many of my peers are not developers and don’t have a license purchased. PowerShell feels more like the command line and is more accessible to them. Just a suggestion for any admins out there.

    Best,
    Jeff (www.spjeff.com / @spjeff)

    Sending Automated emails with Send-MailMessage

    http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2009/10/30/sending-automated-emails-with-send-mailmessage-convertto-html-and-the-powershellpack-s-taskscheduler-module.aspx

    Reply

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