How to send mail from outlook using C # Application

Today I am going to share code for sending email from outlook using your C# application. The code is quite simple and easy but you need to setup email account in outlook with proper configuration.

Sending email using outlook from your C# application is a good idea. You don’t need to store your email account credential in database / file. You don’t need to check for internet connection (outlook will send email automatically when connected to internet).
For sending email using outlook from your c# application you will need to add Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook reference to your project.

after adding this reference to project we are ready to write code for sending email.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
namespace OutlookEmailExample
{
    class SendMail
    {
        public bool SendEmail(string Subject, string To, string Body)
        {
            try
            {
                // Create the Outlook application by using inline initialization.
                Outlook.Application oApp = new Outlook.Application();
    
                //Create the new message by using the simplest approach.
                Outlook.MailItem oMsg = (Outlook.MailItem)oApp.CreateItem(Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem);
    
                //set basic properties
                oMsg.Subject = Subject;// "This is the subject of the test message";

                oMsg.To = To;

                oMsg.Body = Body; // "This is the text in the message.";

                oMsg.Send(); // sending email


                return true;
            }
            catch (Exception ee)
            {
                throw ee;
            }
        }
    }
}

Above code demonstrate the easiest approach to create and send email using outlook from your c# application. It creates a outlook application object, a mail message sets some properties like subject, to, body and send the email.

Using code: To send email from your application you will need to create an  object of class SendMail and call SendEmail method of the class.

SendMail sm = new SendMail();
sm.SendEmail("mail subject", "recipient@host.com", "mail body");

We can add CC and BCC:

oMsg.CC = "recipient1@host.com";
oMsg.BCC = "recipient2@host.com";

Note: sending email using outlook from application may take long time so use the above code in background thread.

We can also send HTML email message too..

oMsg.BodyFormat = Outlook.OlBodyFormat.olFormatHTML; //setting mail type to HTML
oMsg.HTMLBody = Body; // setting HTML body message

by setting body format to html we can send HTML mail from our email application.

I hope this will help someone. :)