How do i send an email when i already have it as a string?

Question

Effectively I'm trying to send some template emails so that I can test a few components that handle reading from mailboxes.

I could just load up outlook and send a couple of emails but I'm looking to find a solution that can read thousands of emails at a time so I need to bulk send these templates t test the reading code.

When I say bulk send ... I have about 10 to 15 templates (varies) and I want to send about 1,000 copies of each to the given mailbox.

Now here's th sticking point ...

I could just fire up an instance of the SMTP client and declare a new MailMessage object then send that using the SMTP client ... the problem is that my email templates contain custom header info so its not just a matter of msg.Body = someText and then setting the To and From and Subject fields.

I don't want to spend time manually parsing these emails because the headers are quite lengthy and contain a lot of custom values that I'll be working on later.

So if I have a txt or eml file how do I send that raw text to my mailbox so I can perform my afformentioned testing?

Answer 1

The best way I know to do this is using MailBee.NET objects which are not free, but you can download a trial: http://www.afterlogic.com/mailbee-net/email-components

Then what you are looking for is something like this:

            MailBee.Mime.MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
            message.LoadMessage(filestream);
            MailBee.SmtpMail.Smtp.QuickSend(message);

Disclosure: I don't work for AfterLogic, but some of their tools have been a big help with Elastic Email (http://elasticemail.com)

Answer 2

If you have a well-formed RFC822 message, just transfer it as-is in the DATA phase of the SMTP transaction. On Unix, it's basically just

sendmail -oi -t <file

On some Linux distros, sendmail is not installed on the PATH; try /usr/lib/sendmail or consult a forum for your particular distro if you cannot come up with a few informed guesses on your own.

Answer 3

Another one that came up in my search is EASendMail by Email Architect. Like MailBee.NET it's not free but I have found specific documentation that shows of the feature you are asking for by calling the SendRawMail method. That example is in C++/CLI but the same would apply to code written in C# or VB.NET. If I end up using trial to test it out I'll post my feedback here.