Scheduled Mail in asp.net

Question

Hai Guys, My application deals scheduled mail concept (i.e) every morning 6.00 am my users gets a remainder mail about their activities for the day... I dont know how t

Answer 1

You can't really do this with ASP.Net. ASP.Net is for web pages - which are reactive to HTTP requests.

You need a scheduled task or a service. All a website can do is respond to requests. I guess you could program the functionality into a web page and have a remote process request the page every morning - but what happens if someone else requests the page?

Answer 2

You can either have a program that runs constantly and has a timer or a loop that checks the time of day and then sleeps for a really long time and when the timer goes off or it's the right time of day it sends an email, or you can launch a program as a scheduled task. The first method can also be implemented as a service if you would like. Keep in mind you dont need ASP.Net to send emails, all you need is a console application that uses System.Net.Mail. Check out the mailer sample on MSDN for a very simple idea.

One other thing you can consider: IIS has an smtp service that you can install and it uses a pickup directory to send mail. You write an email to the pickup directory as an .eml file and IIS grabs it and sends it almost immediately. If you do that, you'll still have to write the emails (System.net.Mail will write the .eml files from a MailMessage, just set SmtpClient.DeliveryMethod to SpecifiedPickupDirectory or PickupDirectoryFromIIS and call SmtpClient.Send) but it will then send them for you. You'll still need to schedule something somehow so this might not be all that more useful but I thought I'd at least let you know that it exists.

One thing to be aware of: when the IIS SMTP service reads the send envelope of the .eml file, the order of the Sender and From headers is significant; if the From header appears before the Sender header then the MAIL FROM command will use the From header, which is incorrect (and MS won't be fixing this one). This appears to be an issue ONLY with the IIS SMTP service as it hasn't been reported anywhere else that I'm aware of. Reversing the order of the headers is the work-around. By default SmtpClient always writes the From header first. I'm aware of the issue and IIS isn't fixing it but I may be able to get a fix into SmtpClient for the .NET 4.0 RC build that re-orders the headers for you but no promises.

Answer 3

If you happen to have it handy (and I assume you do), you can use a SQL Server Agent job to make a request to an ASP.NET page that sends the email.

Here's some example code:

http://nicholasclarke.co.uk/blog/2008/01/16/web-request-from-sql-server-via-c/

Of course, since you're using SQL Server to call CLR code anyway, you could just have that code send out the emails (via System.Net.Mail) rather than requesting a page on IIS to do so. To do this, SQL Server would need:

• Access to all of the data needed to send the emails
• Outbound firewall access to send an email
• CLR code that encapsulates all of the logic needed to know where/what to send.

Answer 4

You cant do much in a shared hosting. Try upgrading your hosting or else write a windows service, to run on your machine, which will call an asp.net which can send out emails. Of course your machine has to be switched on all the time or at least during 6:00 AM :). You will have to take proper steps to avoid unauthorized request for that aspx page.

you can check this article too: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASPNETService.aspx

Answer 5

Okay this is interesting, and what I did fits silky's definite of 'cheating', but no it was pretty cool for me.

What I did was spawn a new thread from ASP.Net code (it was possible on that host), and that thread did the scheduled job.

I checked whether the thread was alive (which is pretty easy) on every visit to the website (not so reliable I know, but it worked cause that website has plenty of visitor).

If at all you do this

• Treat this as a stop-gap while you arrange to get a dedicated host or VPS.
• Rest assured that the hosting company will kill your thread and withdraw permissions when they discover you're doing this.