Email Formatting

oystagoymp · February 14th, 2007, 01:04 AM

I am trying to make a program that emails the text of a RichTextBox. The problem is that when I send the email, the text is unformatted i.e. no line breaks, no font specifications, etc.

I tried using the Rtf property of the RichTextBox but the email sent contains the actual rtf code and not the formatted text.

...
aMessage.Body = richTextBox1.Text;
smtp.Send(aMessage);

Thanks in advance.

Eitan

philip_cole · February 14th, 2007, 05:11 PM

Hi Eitan,

When you are building your message, the best way to do this is to use AlternateView. These can be added to a MailMessage to represent different formats of the message, e.g. when you send a HTML email, you often also get a plain text version in case your email client can't read HTML. The RichTextBox should make this fairly simple to achieve.
The simplest way to create an AlternateView is to use the CreateAlternateViewFromString method:

Code:

using System.Text;
using System.Net.Mail;
using System.Net.Mime;
...
MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
...
AlternateView PlainView = CreateAlternateViewFromString(
    richTextBox1.Text, Encoding.ASCII, MediaTypeNames.Text.Plain);

AlternateView RTFView = CreateAlternateViewFromString(
    richTextBox1.Rtf, Encoding.ASCII, MediaTypeNames.Text.RichText);

message.AlternateViews.Add(PlainView);
message.AlternateViews.Add(RTFView);

Hope this helps
Phil