So this is what I set out to do: create an application that would send out emails to several contacts, with a personalized greeting line, but similar message body. Also, depending on the type of contact, you might want to send a different message. E.g. if it is a close colleague of yours, then you might want to send a more personalized mail rather than a one liner. Since these are personalized emails, these need to be sent from your actual email id rather than an SMTP server on your dev machine. Also, I needed this application to work for someone else who runs only MS Office on his machine. So I decided to use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 for this task.
The first thing to do was to decide the fomat in which I would store all the configuration information that would be used by the application: So I created two different text files, mail1.txt and mail2.txt each with a separate email message:
Hello {0}
Mail body
Where {0} is a placeholder that will be replaced by the receiver name. mail1.txt and mail2.txt have the same structure except for the mail body depending on the requirement.
Next, I needed to create a list of names and the corresponding email IDs to which the mails are to be sent. Also, I needed a flag that will indicate the type of message that is to be sent, i.e. mail1 or mail2. I created a comma separated file with the following format:
<Receiver’s name>, <email id>, <mail body to be sent, i.e. 1 or 2>
I wrote a console application in C# that uses the Microsoft Office 2007 Primary Interop assemblies to automate sending emails to all these contacts specified. The emails get sent using the default account configured in your Outlook. The code looks something like the following. Please note that this is a quick hack which actually works and that I have not really done a lot of error handling or exception management on this because I know the conditions under which this will be used.
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application app = null;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook._NameSpace ns = null;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.PostItem item = null;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder inboxFolder = null;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder subFolder = null;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MailItem memo = null;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder sentFolder = null;
StreamReader addressReader = null;
StreamReader contentsReader = null;
StreamWriter logWriter = null;
try
{
addressReader = new StreamReader(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["addresses"]);
String currentLine = String.Empty;
String[] currentReceiver = null;
String messageBodyFile = String.Empty;
logWriter = new StreamWriter(Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, "Log.txt"), false);
while (!addressReader.EndOfStream)
{
currentLine = addressReader.ReadLine();
currentReceiver = currentLine.Split(',');
switch (currentReceiver[2])
{
case "1":
messageBodyFile = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["contentsFile1"];
break;
case "2":
messageBodyFile = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["contentsFile2"];
break;
default:
Console.WriteLine("Could not send email to ", currentReceiver[0]);
logWriter.WriteLine("Could not send email to ", currentReceiver[0]);
currentReceiver[1] = String.Empty;
break;
}
#region EmailInit
app = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
ns = app.GetNamespace("MAPI");
ns.Logon(null, null, false, false);
sentFolder = ns.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderSentMail);
memo = (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MailItem)app.CreateItem(OlItemType.olMailItem);
#endregion
contentsReader = new StreamReader(messageBodyFile);
memo.To = currentReceiver[1].Trim();
memo.Subject = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["mailSubject"].Trim();
memo.Body = String.Format(contentsReader.ReadToEnd(), currentReceiver[0]);
memo.BodyFormat = OlBodyFormat.olFormatHTML;
memo.Send();
Console.WriteLine("{0}: Sent email with body {1} to {2}:{3}", DateTime.Now, currentReceiver[2], currentReceiver[0], currentReceiver[1]);
logWriter.WriteLine("{0}: Sent email with body {1} to {2}:{3}", DateTime.Now, currentReceiver[2], currentReceiver[0], currentReceiver[1]);
contentsReader.Close();
contentsReader.Dispose();
}
}
catch (System.Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
EventLog.WriteEntry("Email Automation", ex.Message, EventLogEntryType.Error);
}
finally
{
ns = null;
app = null;
inboxFolder = null;
addressReader.Close();
addressReader.Dispose();
logWriter.Close();
logWriter.Dispose();
}
