Re: System.Web.Mail question

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Peter Wone (peterw_at_wamoz.com)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 08:34:26 +1000

> But why implement it yourself when someone else has already done it?

Whether someone else has done "it" depends on your precise definition of
"it" hence I regard the DNF classes mail support adequate for plaintext and
inadequate for fancy work with ASPX etc.

Also sometimes "someone else" hasn't done a proper job. MimeOLE fails to
include watermark graphics referenced by a linked stylesheet. MimeOLE also
leaves stylesheets linked instead of munging them into the HTML which means
they get lost with Outlook Web Access.

> (As for it being trivial - in your article you make mention of an
> earlier version of your class having no error checking etc. Such things
> take time in my experience, but are vital for production systems.)

Yes indeed. My sysadmin asked me to use the pickup folder, apparently it's
faster due to something to do with queueing and how our systems are
configured. The SMTP protocol implementations are there for illustrative
purposes. In my environment this code worked first time which is a big part
of the reason the code never got much in the way of instrumentation. I stand
by my assertion that it is trivial. If you want to criticise me then say
that I am lazy.

Then add "pragmatic" - in a production system the pickup folder is more
likely.

> And I'm sure that's good for many uses, but not all of them. I don't
> see why you think it's actually a bad idea to use Indy.

I don't think it's a bad idea to use Indy - from Delphi. I just think that
if I can write a fancy mailer in 300 lines of pure managed code - and I
did - then it's wrong to write 600 lines of interop.

Regarding attachments, my position on them is that machine generated email
is dangerously close to spam before you even start, and that there's enough
crap in my mailserver queue without me encouraging the irresponsible. The
best reason I can conceive for wanting to attach a file to a machine
generated email would be sending an invoice or similar business document.
However in this situation the document can directly be the body of the
email, leaving me with no ethically acceptable reason for supporting
attachments in machine generated email.

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