"Send E-Mail from your .NET application using your GMail Account"

The Code Project - Send E-Mail from your .NET application using your GMail Account

"Most independent developers like to include a msg sending feature in their application. Well atleast I tried to.. Of course it is not a problem for a user with a smtp server access or a registered domain with an smtp server access. But unfortunately I had none of them. I use msn, gmail and yahoo for my mailing needs. Unfortunately yahoo does not offer smtp or pop access for their general/basic/free users. And msn it is not that reliable coz I was expecting a lot of mails to be sent and also to recive and as far as I know they also donot give you pop/smtp access!.

Typical Example you will find in internet

So I really Hunted for a code segment that help me use my free gmail account to send E-MAIL from my .NET account. http://www.systemwebmail.com is a complete referance library and FAQ’s regarding to the System.Web.Mail namespase. And my code is basically I joined different pieces together...."

This is an interesting project... For reasons I’d rather not post, sending SMTP email on port 25 from within our firewall is extremely restricted.

While a case can be made for locking down 25, there are times when I need to work around the issue and just get the job done (I’m one of those "over, around or through it" kinds of guys... can you tell?). I’ve looked into alternate/custom port SMTP forwarders and while there are a number of them, I couldn’t see spending the funds required. So I’ve done without any email based notification services in my apps. And anyway, I’d rather add RSS based notifications. 

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t kept looking for an email solution (some like email, some like feeds, and I want to keep all my users happy...)

This Code Project post is cool in that it shows just how easy it is to send SMTP email with .Net 2 via GMail. Which also happens to be host on an alternate port. ;)

Maybe it’s time to rethink my notification options...

Technorati Tags: CodeProject, SMTP, GMail, .Net, System.Web.Mail