Asynchronously sending Emails in C# ?

Question

Hi,

I'm developing an application where a user clicks/presses enter on a certain button in a window, the application does some checks and determines whether to send out a couple of emails or not, then show another window with a message.

My issue is, sending out the 2 emails slows the process noticeably, and for some (~8) seconds the first window looks frozen while it's doing the sending.

Is there any way I can have these emails sent on the background and display the next window right away?

Please don't limit your answer with "use X class" or "just use X method" as I am not all too familiarized with the language yet and some more information would be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It's not too complicated to simply send the message on a separate thread:

using System.Net.Mail;

Smtp.SendAsync(message);

Or, if you want to construct the whole message on the separate thread instead of rather just send it Asynchronously:

using System.Threading;
using System.Net.Mail;

var sendMailThread = new Thread(() => {
    var message=new MailMessage();
    message.From="from e-mail";
    message.To="to e-mail";
    message.Subject="Message Subject";
    message.Body="Message Body";

    SmtpMail.SmtpServer="SMTP Server Address";
    SmtpMail.Send(message);
});

sendMailThread.Start();

Answer 2

What you want to do is run the e-mail task on a separate thread so the main code can continue processing while the other thread does the e-mail work.

Here is a tutorial on how to do that: Threading Tutorial C#

Answer 3

SmtpClient.SendAsync Method

Answer 4

The easiest Solution is to create a BackgroundWorker and push the mails into a queue. Then just let the BackgroundWorker go through the queue and send each mail.

See also How to: Run an Operation in the Background

Answer 5

Use the SmtpClient class and use the method SendAsync in the System.Net.Mail namespace.

Answer 6

Just because this is a little vague...I will be brief...

There are a lot of ways to do asynchronous or parallel work in c#/.net etc.

The fastest way to do what you want is to use a background worker thread which will avoid locking up your UI.

A tip with background worker threads : you cannot directly update the UI from them (thread affinity and Marshalling is just something you learn to deal with...)

Another thing to consider...if you use the standard System.Net.Mail type stuff to send the emails...be careful how you craft your logic. If you isolate it all in some method and call it over and over, it will likely have to tear down and rebuild the connection to the mail server each time and the latency involved in authentication etc will still slow the whole thing down unnecessarily. Send multiple e-mails through a single open connection to the mail server when possible.

Answer 7

Try this:

var client = new System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient("smtp.server");
var message = new System.Net.Mail.MailMessage() { /* provide its properties */ };
client.SendAsync(message, null);

Answer 8

Using the Task Parallel Library in .NET 4.0, you can do:

Parllel.Invoke(() => { YourSendMailMethod(); });

Also, see cristina manu's blog post about Parallel.Invoke() vs. explicit task management.

Answer 9

As it's a small unit of work you should use ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem for the threading aspect of it. If you use the SmtpClient class to send your mail you could handle the SendCompleted event to give feedback to the user.

ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(t =>
{
    SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("MyMailServer");
    MailAddress from = new MailAddress("[email protected]", "My Name", System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
    MailAddress to = new MailAddress("[email protected]");
    MailMessage message = new MailMessage(from, to);
    message.Body = "The message I want to send.";
    message.BodyEncoding =  System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
    message.Subject = "The subject of the email";
    message.SubjectEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
    // Set the method that is called back when the send operation ends.
    client.SendCompleted += new SendCompletedEventHandler(SendCompletedCallback);
    // The userState can be any object that allows your callback 
    // method to identify this send operation.
    // For this example, I am passing the message itself
    client.SendAsync(message, message);
});

private static void SendCompletedCallback(object sender, AsyncCompletedEventArgs e)
{
        // Get the message we sent
        MailMessage msg = (MailMessage)e.UserState;

        if (e.Cancelled)
        {
            // prompt user with "send cancelled" message 
        }
        if (e.Error != null)
        {
            // prompt user with error message 
        }
        else
        {
            // prompt user with message sent!
            // as we have the message object we can also display who the message
            // was sent to etc 
        }

        // finally dispose of the message
        if (msg != null)
            msg.Dispose();
}

By creating a fresh SMTP client each time this will allow you to send out emails simultaneously.

Answer 10

You can write -the intent to send that message- to a transactional queue (such as a database table). You can than have another program (such as a Windows Service) that processes the queue.

When you do this you can not only send messages in the background without disturbing your main application, but you can also ensure that the message is send as part of a bigger business transaction. This is useful in situations were you want to prevent the message to be sent when the (database) transaction is rolled back.

When doing this type of asynchronous command processing, it also allows to implement retry mechanisms and monitoring when execution of asynchronous operations fail. For instance, when a message was failed be send, you could fix that command reschedule it.