What is the best way to handle multiple mail servers in the mailSettings section of the web.config?

Question

I have an application that sends 500K+ transactional emails a month. Some are more important than others. I need the important emails to go out using a high-delivery email solution with tracking (read more expensive) and the less important emails using an ordinary mail server.

Is there a way setup multiple smtp sections in mailSettings pointing to the two mail servers and let the code choose which mail server they want to do the sending with.

There is a way to do it using the "location" and have the pages handle sending the email pick the smtp server based on the path. However I have a separate background process forked that is doing this asynchronously and this will not help much.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Instead of using mailsettings, perhaps look into using appsettings to store your server connection strings.

<appSettings>
   <add key="SmtpServer.Fast" value="fast.smtp.mycompany.com" />
   <add key="SmtpServer.Slow" value="slow.smtp.mycompany.com" />
</appSettings>

Then just use new SmtpClient(server) instead of new SmtpClient() Then you could set up your code to be something like:

SmtpClient client = null;

if (IsHighPriorityMessage(msg))
  client = new SmtpClient(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SmtpServer.Fast"]);
else
  client = new SmtpClient(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SmtpServer.Slow"]);

If you need to configure authentication, just use client.Credentials