C# MailTo with Attachment?

Question

Currently I am using the below method to open the users outlook email account and populate an email with the relevant content for sending:

public void SendSupportEmail(string emailAddress, string subject, string body)
     {
      Process.Start("mailto:" + emailAddress + "?subject=" + subject + "&body=" 
       + body);
     }

I want to however, be able to populate the email with an attached file.

something like:

public void SendSupportEmail(string emailAddress, string subject, string body)
         {
          Process.Start("mailto:" + emailAddress + "?subject=" + subject + "&body=" 
           + body + "&Attach=" + @"C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\stuff.txt");
         }

However this does not seem to work. Does anyone know of a way which will allow this to work!?

Help greatly appreciate.

Regards.

Answer 1

Does this app really need to use Outlook? Is there a reason for not using the System.Net.Mail namespace?

If you really do need to use Outlook ( and I would not recommend it because then you're basing your app on 3rd party dependencies that are likely to change) you will need to look into the Microsoft.Office namespaces

I'd start here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.outlook.aspx

Answer 2

mailto: doesn't officially support attachments. I've heard Outlook 2003 will work with this syntax:

<a href='mailto:[email protected]?Subject=SubjTxt&Body=Bod_Txt&Attachment=""C:\file.txt"" '>

A better way to handle this is to send the mail on the server using System.Net.Mail.Attachment.

    public static void CreateMessageWithAttachment(string server)
    {
        // Specify the file to be attached and sent.
        // This example assumes that a file named Data.xls exists in the
        // current working directory.
        string file = "data.xls";
        // Create a message and set up the recipients.
        MailMessage message = new MailMessage(
           "[email protected]",
           "[email protected]",
           "Quarterly data report.",
           "See the attached spreadsheet.");

        // Create  the file attachment for this e-mail message.
        Attachment data = new Attachment(file, MediaTypeNames.Application.Octet);
        // Add time stamp information for the file.
        ContentDisposition disposition = data.ContentDisposition;
        disposition.CreationDate = System.IO.File.GetCreationTime(file);
        disposition.ModificationDate = System.IO.File.GetLastWriteTime(file);
        disposition.ReadDate = System.IO.File.GetLastAccessTime(file);
        // Add the file attachment to this e-mail message.
        message.Attachments.Add(data);

        //Send the message.
        SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(server);
        // Add credentials if the SMTP server requires them.
        client.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;

  try {
          client.Send(message);
        }
        catch (Exception ex) {
          Console.WriteLine("Exception caught in CreateMessageWithAttachment(): {0}", 
                ex.ToString() );              
        }
        data.Dispose();
    }

Answer 3

If you want to access the default email client then you can use MAPI32.dll (works on Windows OS only). Take a look at the following wrapper:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/SendFileToNET.aspx

Code looks like this:

MAPI mapi = new MAPI();
mapi.AddAttachment("c:\\temp\\file1.txt");
mapi.AddAttachment("c:\\temp\\file2.txt");
mapi.AddRecipientTo("[email protected]");
mapi.AddRecipientTo("[email protected]");
mapi.SendMailPopup("testing", "body text");

// Or if you want try and do a direct send without displaying the mail dialog
// mapi.SendMailDirect("testing", "body text");