Question

I have a console application that sends customized emails (with attachments) to different recipients and I want to send them concurrently. I need to create separate SmtpClients to achieve this so I am using QueueUserWorkItem to create the emails and send them in separate threads.

Snippet

var events = new Dictionary<Guid, AutoResetEvent>();
foreach (...)
{
    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(delegate
    {
        var id = Guid.NewGuid();
        events.Add(id, new AutoResetEvent(false));
        var alert = // create custom class which internally creates SmtpClient & Mail Message
        alert.Send();
        events[id].Set();
    });   
}
// wait for all emails to signal
WaitHandle.WaitAll(events.Values.ToArray());

I have noticed (intermittently) that sometimes not all the emails arrive in the specific mailboxes with the above code. I would have thought that using Send over SendAsync would mean the email has definitely sent from the application. However, adding the following line of code after the WaitHandle.WaitAll line:

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(5000);

Seems to work. My thinking is, for whatever reason, some emails still haven’t been sent (even after the Send method has run). Giving those extra 5 seconds seems to give the application enough time to finish.

Is this perhaps an issue with the way I am waiting on the emails to send? Or is this an issue with the actual Send method? Has the email definitely been sent from the app once we pass this line?

Any thoughts idea’s on this would be great, can’t quite seem to put my finger on the actual cause.

Update

As requested here is the SMTP code:

SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("Host");
FieldInfo transport = client.GetType().GetField("transport", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
FieldInfo authModules = transport.GetValue(client).GetType()
    .GetField("authenticationModules", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
Array modulesArray = authModules.GetValue(transport.GetValue(client)) as Array;
modulesArray.SetValue(modulesArray.GetValue(2), 0);
modulesArray.SetValue(modulesArray.GetValue(2), 1);
modulesArray.SetValue(modulesArray.GetValue(2), 3);
try
{
    // create mail message
    ...
    emailClient.Send(emailAlert);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    // log exception
}
finally
{
    emailAlert.Dispose();
}

Answer 1

One of the things that’s bugging me about your code is that you call events.Add within the thread method. The Dictionary<TKey, TValue> class is not thread-safe; this code should not be inside the thread.

Update: I think ChaosPandion posted a good implementation, but I would make it even simpler, make it so nothing can possibly go wrong in terms of thread-safety:

var events = new List<AutoResetEvent>();
foreach (...)
{
    var evt = new AutoResetEvent();
    events.Add(evt);
    var alert = CreateAlert(...);
    ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(delegate
    {           
        alert.Send();
        evt.Set();
    });
}
// wait for all emails to signal
WaitHandle.WaitAll(events.ToArray());

I’ve eliminated the dictionary completely here, and all of the AutoResetEvent instances are created in the same thread that later performs a WaitAll. If this code doesn’t work, then it must be a problem with the e-mail itself; either the server is dropping messages (how many are you sending?) or you’re trying to share something non-thread-safe between Alert instances (possibly a singleton or something declared statically).