SendGird Alternative

Question

User-1671627117 posted

After completing the excellent tutorial here, I found that SendGird is extremely slow. It always takes at least 12 minutes to send email.

In some cases, email is never received.

http://www.asp.net/mvc/overview/security/create-an-aspnet-mvc-5-web-app-with-email-confirmation-and-password-reset

There is a quick, easy alternative to SendGird is Gmail with the code below and remove configSendGridasync

 public async Task SendAsync(IdentityMessage message)
        {
            // Plug in your email service here to send an email.

            var sentFrom = "[e-mail]";

            // Configure the client:
            System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient client = new System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com");

            client.Port = 587;
            client.DeliveryMethod = System.Net.Mail.SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network;
            client.UseDefaultCredentials = false;

            // Creatte the credentials:
            System.Net.NetworkCredential credentials = new NetworkCredential(
                 ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["mailAccount"],
                 ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["mailPassword"]
                 );
            client.EnableSsl = true;
            client.Credentials = credentials;

            // Create the message:
            var mail = new System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(sentFrom, message.Destination);
            mail.Subject = message.Subject;
            mail.Body = message.Body;

            await client.SendMailAsync(mail);
        }

There is two important security factors to consider:

1. Create a dummy gmail, do not use your own because you need to set  the gmail account security to lesssecureapps:

Click on this link when with your dummy gmail only: https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

2. Your gmail account and password should be in global Web.Config as per the tutorial

<code>

<appSettings>

.....

<add key="mailAccount" value="your gmail account" />
 <add key="mailPassword" value="your gmail password" />

.....

</appSettings>

</code>

Gmail sends email within 1 minute, normally less than 10 secs. SendGrid is a joke.

Answer 1

User1826113580 posted

Hi Tony,

Fortunately, I found your post and it helped me a great deal!  For a variety of reasons I didn't want to use the SendGrid method in the tutorial.  Your write-up was very clear and just what I needed to use gmail.  Thank you very much for posting this!

Answer 2

User-1851835828 posted

Cheers Tony. Managed to get this working.

My only question is does this line of code actually do anything?

var sentFrom = "[e-mail]";

All of my test emails come from the Gmail account I'm using the send the emails from. How can we make the emails appear to come from a different address and what steps should we take to ensure that these emails don't go straight to people's spam folders?

Thanks.

Answer 3

User1308395552 posted

Thanks a lot :)
Thats way better than using sendgrid.