Sending Mail With An Embedded Image

Introduction

This article will help to get a basic idea of mailing with an embedded image or object from ASP.NET 2.0 using SMTP client.

Background

When I was in need of the same code, I got a lot of code from different sites but in some cases the mail was going in particular cases only. I mean to say that in Yahoo, the image was displaying, but in others it was not. In some cases, the image was going as an attachment so I wrote this code which sends your image with the mail body. For example, if you want to send your company's logo in the body of the mail, you can do that with this code.

Using the Code

The code is very simple and pretty straightforward. As a prerequisite, you should have access to a mail server.

//create the mail message
MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();

//set the addresses
mail.From = new MailAddress("prashant@gmail.com");
mail.To.Add("you@gmail.com");

//set the content
mail.Subject = "Mail From Prashant Lavate";

//first we create the Plain Text part
AlternateView plainView = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString
    ("This is my text , viewable by those clients that don't support html", 
    null, "text/plain");

//then we create the HTML part
//to embed images, we need to use the prefix 'cid' in the img src value
//the cid value will map to the Content-Id of a Linked resource.
//thus <img src='cid:logo'> will map to a LinkedResource with a 
//ContentId of 'companylogo'
AlternateView htmlView = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString
    ("Here is an embedded image.<img src=cid:companylogo>", null, "text/html");

//create the LinkedResource (embedded image)
LinkedResource logo = new LinkedResource( "c:\\temp\\prashant.gif" );
logo.ContentId = "logo";
//add the LinkedResource to the appropriate view
htmlView.LinkedResources.Add(logo);

//add the views
mail.AlternateViews.Add(plainView);
mail.AlternateViews.Add(htmlView);

//send the message
SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient("127.0.0.1"); //specify the mail server address
smtp.Send(mail); 

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History

• 20^th June, 2007: Initial post