Sending E-Mail to Multiple Users from a Database

The Question:

Anyone done this yet... I am interested in making a mail list system that will query database for email address for users and send out a generic e-mail.

The Answer:

This can be done using the System.Web.Mail namespace. This namespace has two classes you will use to accomplish this, MailMessage and SmtpMail. The MailMessage class represents a single e-mail message, and the SmtpMail class is used to send the MailMessage using the configured SMTP server.

The following code should be used in a method or event handler where the e-mail address are retreived from a database. Here you loop through the e-mail addresses, changing the "To" property of the MailMessage and sending it.

[VB] 'cmd is a SqlCommand that gets email addresses Dim _r As SqlDataReader = cmd.ExecuteReader() Dim _mm As System.Web.Mail.MailMessage = New System.Web.Mail.MailMessage() _mm.From = "me@mydomain.com" _mm.Body = "This is my e-mail message" While _r.Read() _mm.To = _r("Email") System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail.Send(_mm) Loop [C#] //cmd is a SqlCommand that gets email addresses SqlDataReader _r = cmd.ExecuteReader(); System.Web.Mail.MailMessage _mm = new System.Web.Mail.MailMessage(); _mm.From = "me@mydomain.com"; _mm.Body = "This is my e-mail message"; while ( _r.Read() ) { _mm.To = _r["Email"]; System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail.Send(_mm); }

*Note: This thype of function is limited to the timeout settings of a Web request, so it will only work for up to around 1,000 e-mail addresses.