Is Performance of Storing Email in Pickup Directory similar to Asynchronous Sending?

Question

ASP.NET MVC 1 doesn't support asynchronous threads spawned inside of a controller (yet, there is stuff in the Futures assembly and MVC 2 Preview, but nothing in production level release). However, I want to send my email asynchronously and I'm currently exploring options to do so.

Once seemingly easy option, instead of actually sending the email synchronously, appears to set the delivery method to drop directory instead of sending it, and then have the SMTP server pick up the email at its own pace.

Is the performance of using the drop directory similar to using asynchronous email sending?

Answer 1

SmtpClient actually has SendAsync method which can be used.

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UPDATE:

After further analyzing this scenario it seems that using SmtpClient.SendAsync inside a synchronous controller throws the following exception:

Asynchronous operations are not allowed in this context. Page starting an asynchronous operation has to have the Async attribute set to true and an asynchronous operation can only be started on a page prior to PreRenderComplete event.

As a workaround a manual thread can be spawned:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    new Thread(() =>
    {
        // TODO: Add exception handling here:
        var client = new SmtpClient("host");
        client.Send("from", "to", "subject", "body");
    }).Start();

    return View();
}