.NET 6.0 - Send an Email via SMTP with MailKit
Tutorial built with .NET 6.0
Other versions available:
- .NET: .NET 5.0, ASP.NET Core 3.1
- Node: Node.js
This is a quick example of how to send an email in .NET 6.0 using the MailKit email client library.
For more info on MailKit see https://github.com/jstedfast/MailKit.
Install MailKit via NuGet
.NET Core CLI: dotnet add package MailKit
Visual Studio Package Manager Console: Install-Package MailKit
Send an HTML email in .NET 6.0
This code sends a simple HTML email using the Ethereal fake SMTP service, for quick testing you can create a temporary inbox at https://ethereal.email/ and copy the SMTP configuration options. There are instructions further below on how to use a few other popular SMTP providers - Gmail, Hotmail, Office 365 and AWS SES.
// create email message
var email = new MimeMessage();
email.From.Add(MailboxAddress.Parse("[email protected]"));
email.To.Add(MailboxAddress.Parse("[email protected]"));
email.Subject = "Test Email Subject";
email.Body = new TextPart(TextFormat.Html) { Text = "<h1>Example HTML Message Body</h1>" };
// send email
using var smtp = new SmtpClient();
smtp.Connect("smtp.ethereal.email", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
smtp.Authenticate("[USERNAME]", "[PASSWORD]");
smtp.Send(email);
smtp.Disconnect(true);
Send a plain text email in .NET 6.0
This code sends the same email as above with a plain text body.
// create email message
var email = new MimeMessage();
email.From.Add(MailboxAddress.Parse("[email protected]"));
email.To.Add(MailboxAddress.Parse("[email protected]"));
email.Subject = "Test Email Subject";
email.Body = new TextPart(TextFormat.Plain) { Text = "Example Plain Text Message Body" };
// send email
using var smtp = new SmtpClient();
smtp.Connect("smtp.ethereal.email", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
smtp.Authenticate("[USERNAME]", "[PASSWORD]");
smtp.Send(email);
smtp.Disconnect(true);
Send SMTP email with Gmail, Hotmail, Office 365 or AWS SES
To change the above code to use a different email provider simply update the host parameter (the first parameter) passed to the smtp.Connect() method, for example:
// gmail
smtp.Connect("smtp.gmail.com", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
// hotmail
smtp.Connect("smtp.live.com", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
// office 365
smtp.Connect("smtp.office365.com", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
// aws ses (simple email service)
smtp.Connect("email-smtp.[AWS REGION].amazonaws.com", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls)
Wrap it up in an Email Service
To encapsulate the email sending functionality so it's easy to send email from anywhere in your .NET app you can create an EmailService class and IEmailService interface like below.
The email service is taken from a .NET auth boilerplate API tutorial I posted recently, to test the email sending functionality you can run the API locally and register an account which triggers a verification email, for full instructions see .NET 6.0 - Boilerplate API Tutorial with Email Sign Up, Verification, Authentication & Forgot Password.
namespace WebApi.Services;
using MailKit.Net.Smtp;
using MailKit.Security;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Options;
using MimeKit;
using MimeKit.Text;
using WebApi.Helpers;
public interface IEmailService
{
void Send(string to, string subject, string html, string from = null);
}
public class EmailService : IEmailService
{
private readonly AppSettings _appSettings;
public EmailService(IOptions<AppSettings> appSettings)
{
_appSettings = appSettings.Value;
}
public void Send(string to, string subject, string html, string from = null)
{
// create message
var email = new MimeMessage();
email.From.Add(MailboxAddress.Parse(from ?? _appSettings.EmailFrom));
email.To.Add(MailboxAddress.Parse(to));
email.Subject = subject;
email.Body = new TextPart(TextFormat.Html) { Text = html };
// send email
using var smtp = new SmtpClient();
smtp.Connect(_appSettings.SmtpHost, _appSettings.SmtpPort, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
smtp.Authenticate(_appSettings.SmtpUser, _appSettings.SmtpPass);
smtp.Send(email);
smtp.Disconnect(true);
}
}
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