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C#: Create a simple SMTP email with HTML body

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SMTP Email

SMTP Client

To create an SMTP client, we need to specify an SMTP host and port, the port is an optional parameter.

For some SMTP clients, we need to provide credentials. We need a Network-credential instance for that. We can use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to encrypt the connection.

var client = new  SmtpClient(host, Convert.ToInt32(port))
 {
      UseDefaultCredentials = true,
      Credentials = new  NetworkCredential(username, password),
       EnableSsl = true
  };

This shows how to instantiate an SMTP client. If you are using Gmail, the host is smtp.gmail.com or else some specific SMTP server. If the port is available, specify the port.

Mail Message

After working with SMTP client, then we need is a MailMessage object.

MailMessage message = new  MailMessage();
message.From = new  MailAddress(fromAddress);
foreach (string address in toAddress)
  message.To.Add(address);
message.Subject = subject;
message.Body = body;
message.IsBodyHtml = true;

MailMessage from and to should be MailAddress instances.

In this example, we used IsBodyHtml attribute to notify mail body can be an HTML string.

Complete code is shown below

public static  bool SendEmail(string host, int port, string username, string password, string fromAddress, List<string> toAddress, string  subject, string  body)
 {
    bool emailSent = false;
    MailMessage message = new  MailMessage();
    message.From = new  MailAddress(fromAddress);
    foreach (string address in toAddress)
        message.To.Add(address);
    message.Subject = subject;
    message.Body = body;
    message.IsBodyHtml = true;
 
    var client = new  SmtpClient(host, Convert.ToInt32(port))
    {
       UseDefaultCredentials = true,        Credentials = new  NetworkCredential(username, password),
       EnableSsl = true
   };
    try
   {
      client.Send(message);
      emailSent = true;
      logger.Info(string.Format("Email sent from {0} to {1}", fromAddress, string.Join(",", toAddress)));
   }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
       emailSent = false;
       logger.Error(ExceptionHandler.ToLongString(ex));
   }
     return emailSent;    }

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