Send Email from SharePoint - SPUtility.SendEmail

Sending email is a key function of enterprises solutions. Inside SharePoint collaboration environment you always need to send email from within SharePoint. For this purpose you can use SPUtility class SendEmail method.

 

Did you ever need to send an email out, from your SharePoint custom web application? When you have such a task, perhaps the first idea that you have is to use System.Net.Mailnamespace. However, this requires that your application maintains a setting for the SMTP server, reply address and etc.

If you want the task of storing this configuration to SharePoint (and its Administrator) and instead, just focus on sending out the actual email then the solution is the Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtilityclass! It has the very convenient method 'SendEmail'. This is basically SharePoint's native functionality for email delivery.

The first thing you (or the SharePoint Administrator) need to do is setup the Outgoing email SMTP server. Open Central Admin àSystem SettingsàConfigure Outgoing Email

There, you need to set the Outbound SMTP server, From address and Reply-to address.

Now, you actually send email from your code as follows:

First, it is always a good idea to check if the email server is set:
bool blnIsEmailServerSet = SPUtility.IsEmailServerSet(web);

If this returns false, you should not bother trying to send the email. Instead, show an error message or notify the SharePoint administrator, to check the settings of the server. If it returns true, you are good to go:

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;
bool appendHtmlTag = false;
bool htmlEncode = false;
string toAddress = "test@example.com";
string subject = "Subject";
string message = "Message text";
bool result = SPUtility.SendEmail(web, appendHtmlTag, htmlEncode, toAddress, subject, message);

In some cases, you may need to run this code with elevated privileges:
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
{
bool result = SPUtility.SendEmail(web, appendHtmlTag, htmlEncode, toAddress, subject, message);
});

SendEmail method returns a boolean, indicating if sending the email was successful or not.

As you can see that sending email using SPUtility is straightforward, please also note the following considerations

1.   No attachment allowed

2.   Message body size cannot exceed 2048 characters.

3.   The from address will be the “Outbound Sender Address” configured in the central admin.