How to send an e-mail with attachment from SharePoint

October 2, 2007   11:52


How to send an e-mail with attachment from SharePointOne of the ways to send an e-mail from SharePoint as developer, is to make use of the “SPUtility.SendEmail” classes. But unfortunately I did not find any possibility to include an attachment with the help of these classes.

To be able to send attachment I decided to make use of the normal “System.Net.Mail” classes to send a message. Instead of hard coding the SMTP information into the code, I wanted to use the SMTP settings that are configured with the SharePoint Central Administration. These settings are found in the “SPAdministrationWebApplication” class.

Because SharePoint stores it’s files into the content database, we must do a http request to retrieve the attachment. Using the “System.Net.WebClient” is one way to do it and one of the advantages is that you can supply it with the credentials of the user that is trying to send the mail.

You will receive an unauthorized message if you don’t supply a correct set of credentials. It’s probably not a good idea to hardcode the credentials as it will be possible for users to get access to files they are not supposed to. Supplying the WebClient with the “CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials” worked fine for me on a standard SharePoint environment.

Below is a brief example on how you can send the mail with attachment from code. If you prefer to use the user’s e-mail address instead of the configured SMTP user you can retrieve it with SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context).CurrentUser.Email.

(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , .









The content expressed in this blog are those of Edwin Vriethoff and do not represent his employer's view in anyway. The contents of this blog has been carefully put together, but Edwin Vriethoff is not responsible in any way for any direct or indirect harm caused by individuals or organizations using the content of this blog in any way.