How can I send rich emails using the user's mail client ?
- by Brann
I need my .net program to send rich emails (usually containing table data, around 20 columns x 10 rows) using the user's mail infrastructure, allowing him to review/edit the mail before sending it, and storing the mail in his 'sent items' folder.
mailto: seems the obvious choice, but unfortunately, it doesn't support neither attachments nor html bodies. It seems some clients support some extra features (e.g. Outlook 97 used to support a &Attach tag, but this is not the case for more recent versions).
I could use mailto and try to format the text body to look nice (using tabs, etc), but this isn't really elegant and wouldn't support huge data.
using automation seems a very huge task, as I would need to automate dozens of clients (4 or 5 versions of outlook, lotusnotes, thunderbid, etc.) ... This would be a huge task and it's not really my core business ...
I could send emails through code and write my own mail form to let the user edit the mail, but this would have a lot of drawbacks :
the user would need to manually configure the mail server settings
he wouldn't have access to his contact directory
the mail wouldn't be sent in his sent items folder
This seems a quite common issue, but I haven't found any satisfying solution yet ; does someone knows of a library supporting this (ie containing automation logic for most mainstream email clients?). Or an alternative to mailto ?
