Sending SMTP Email with Advanced Features in Visual Basic.NET | Part 1 – Adding Multiple Attachments

This is Part 1 of ‘Sending Email with Advanced Features’ which will show how you can send an email message and add not just one attachment, but pretty much as many attachments as you want. If you haven’t already, I recommend you check out this article I made on the basics of setting up and sending email using the System.NET.Mail SMTP feature in the DotNET Framework. The code i’m using is compatible with Visual Basic .NET 2005, VB 2008, and VB.NET 2010 since i’m using the classes under the System.NET.Mail namespace which is made available in the .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, and the .NET 4.0 Frameworks. I am using SMTP and a Google GMail account to send the email message.

First of all to get started you will want a instance of a few classes. Below are the ones you’ll need to setup…

• System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient
• System.Net.Mail.MailMessage
• System.Net.Mail.Attachment

Below are the variables I am using for the classes above…

'The Simple Mail Tranfer Protocol client with the Host and Port number to use. You will

'want to change these settings to what you need to use. The host, smtp.gmail.com and port

'will work if you have a gmail account.

Dim smtp As New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com", 587)

'This will contain the actual message data to send.

Dim eMailmessage As New System.Net.Mail.MailMessage

'Will contain the attachment info to send with the message.

Dim attachToMsg As System.Net.Mail.Attachment

Now that the main dimension code is done its time to setup your mail message.

'Use Secure Socket Layer to Encrypt the connection for sending the mail. This needs

'be set to "True".

smtp.EnableSsl = True

'Setup the gmail host.

smtp.Credentials = New System.Net.NetworkCredential("gmailLoginName@gmail.com", "gmailLoginPassword")

You can now set the email’s Body/Text, Subject, From/Sender, and Recipient.

eMailmessage.Subject = "Check out my attachments!"

eMailmessage.Body = "I hope you got all of my attachments in this email!"

eMailmessage.From = New Mail.MailAddress("you@hotmail.com, "Jason")

eMailmessage.To.Add("ToPerson@yahoo.com)

Now before you send your email to the recipient, its time to setup and add more than a single attachment to your message. As you will see adding more than 1 attachment to your message is easy. I am using a OpeFileDialog to open a dialog window to select multiple files. Once the Dialog’s Open button is clicked then I will add all of the Filenames that was selected in the Open Dialog object.

'Create a openDialog object to be able to select a attachment to the mail message.

Dim openDLG As New OpenFileDialog

'openDLG.AddExtension = True

openDLG.ReadOnlyChecked = True

openDLG.Multiselect = True

openDLG.Title = "Select the file(s) you want added to the message..."

openDLG.Filter = "All Files (*.*)|*.*"

If openDLG.ShowDialog = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK Then

For Each item As String In openDLG.FileNames

'Create a new System.NET.Mail.Attachment class instance for each file.

attachToMsg = New System.Net.Mail.Attachment(item)

'Then add the attachment to your message. You have to do this everytime you run the code

'above.

eMailmessage.Attachments.Add(attachToMsg)

Next

Msgbox "I have finished adding all of the selected files! You can do more if you want!"

End If

As you can see, adding multiple attachments to an email is very simple. Now all thats left to do is send your message to your recipient(s).

'When you are done with setting up your email and add your attachments then you just need

'to send your message.

smtp.Send(eMailmessage)

Thats all there is to it! Do remember though that attachment sizes can add up very quickly. Before fully sending your email, it has to upload every file you attached to the message. So just remember that it could take awhile before its sent to the smtp server for processing. I advise you to use the smtp.SendAsync method to send your email since it will execute the resources for sending the email on a new thread seperate from your applications thread. Otherwise you will have to wait for the mail process to complete before you can continue using your application. I plan on adding a couple more parts in the near future. I plan on showing how to use a class I found that will easly convert rtf code to html code that allows you to use a richtextbox for the body of the email message and make it so the email will look very similar to how it looked and was formatted in the richtextbox control. I also plan on showing how to send an email with Alternative Views so that way you can send your email with different formats like Plain Text and Html and so on which allows the mail reader to pick which view would be best. Anyways, Have Fun!