Howto Send E-mail from an ASPX Page


NOTE: the concepts presented in this article are now considered obsolete possibly because better alternatives are available.
This article will show you how simple it is to send an e-mail from an ASPX page. With just a few lines of code, you can add mail sending capabilities to your ASP.NET page in your website. Sample code is in C#.
Sending e-mail from your website has never been easier before. No more hassle with (commercial) third-party components, or difficult configuration settings. This mini-tutorial will show the steps you need to perform to send an e-mail from an ASP.NET web page.

Prerequisites

This article (and many others on this site) assumes the following prerequisites:
  • Visual Studio .NET 2002 or 2003
  • The .NET Framework 1.0 or 1.1

Please note: this article was written against .NET 1.x; many years ago. For a .NET 2.0 or later solution, check out www.systemnetmail.com/.

Sending e-mail

To send an E-mail from an ASPX page, you'll need to use the System.Web.Mail namespace that contains the MailMessage and SmtpMail classes. The MailMessage class represent the actual message and the SmtpMail class is used to send the message to one or more recipients.

Let's take a look at the code of a simple example to see how it works. We'll start with the ASPX file, called SendMail.aspx:

<%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="SendMail.aspx.cs" 
        AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="Demos.Email.SendMail" %>
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en" > 
<html>
<head>
  <title>Send an E-mail with ASP.NET</title>
</head>
<body>
  <form id="frmSendEmail" method="post" runat="server">
    Your name: <asp:textbox id="txtName" runat="server"></asp:textbox><br>
    Your message: <asp:textbox id="txtMessage"
          runat="server"textmode="MultiLine"></asp:textbox><br>
    <asp:button id="btnSubmit" runat="server" 
          text="Send E-mail"></asp:button>
    <asp:label id="lblErrorMessage" runat="server" 
          visible="False"></asp:label>
  </form>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, this page is pretty simple. All it does is create two text boxes, a button and a label. The text boxes are for the name of your visitor and for the message they want to send to you. The button will submit the form to the server where the e-mail will be sent. Notice that the label, lblErrorMessage, is hidden by default. It's used to display an error message to the user when they forget either their name or the message.

The important bits of this example can be found in the Code Behind file for this page, SendMail.aspx.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.SessionState;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.Mail;

namespace Demos.Email
As usual in a Code Behind, a couple of namespaces are imported. You'll see all of them in a regular ASP.NET page, except for the System.Web.Mail entry. This namepsace is required when you want to send an e-mail. 

{
  /// <summary>
  /// Simple demo class that sends an e-mail
  /// </summary>
  public class SendMail : System.Web.UI.Page
  {
    protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox txtName;
    protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label lblErrorMessage;
    protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox txtMessage;

    private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
    {
The controls you added to the ASPX page are declared in the Code Behind as well, so you have programmatic access to them. 

      if (IsPostBack)
      {
        string name = txtName.Text;
        string message = txtMessage.Text;
        if(name.Length == 0 || message.Length ==0)
        {
          lblErrorMessage.Text = "Please type your name and a message";
          lblErrorMessage.Visible = true;
        }
        else
        {
          message = "This e-mail was sent by " + name + "\r\n" + message;
The fields that are required are checked for the length. If either one of them is empty, the message will not be submitted, but an error message is displayed instead. Note that you could use ASP.NET Validation controls for this, but for the sake of simplicity, I left them out here. 

          MailMessage objMail = new MailMessage();

          objMail.From = "Your From Name <You@YourProvider.com>";
          objMail.To = "Your To Name <You@YourProvider.com>";
          objMail.Subject = "Response from website";
          objMail.Body = message;
          SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "smtp.YourProvider.com";
          SmtpMail.Send(objMail);
          Response.Redirect("ThankYou.aspx");
Once you know that you have some valid values, you can create a new MailMessage object. You'll need to set at least a To and a From, a Subject and the Body to make it a useful message. The SmtpServer is the server that actually sends the e-mail message. You can use the name of the SMTP server of your provider here. Alternatively, if you have an SMTP server at your local machine, you can add localhost here. 

        }
      }
    }
    #region Web Form Designer generated code
    override protected void OnInit(EventArgs e)
    {
      //
      // CODEGEN: This call is required by the ASP.NET Web Form Designer.
      //
      InitializeComponent();
      base.OnInit(e);
    }
  
    /// <summary>
    /// Required method for Designer support - do not modify
    /// the contents of this method with the code editor.
    /// </summary>
    private void InitializeComponent()
    { 
      this.Load += new System.EventHandler(this.Page_Load);
    }
    #endregion
  }
}
The code ends with some regular ASP.NET page stuff, like the Required Design support code, and the Load handler for the current page. When you save, compile and run this page, you can fill in your name and a message and hit the Send E-mail button. The code in the Page_Load event will fire, and your e-mail will be sent.

Required Namespaces

Download Files


Where to Next?

Wonder where to go next? You can post a comment on this article.

Doc ID 121
Full URL https://imar.spaanjaars.com/121/howto-send-e-mail-from-an-aspx-page
Short cut https://imar.spaanjaars.com/121/
Written by Imar Spaanjaars
Date Posted 09/22/2003 17:15
Date Last Reviewed 12/08/2006 15:01

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