Question

I have a webpage which I would like users to be able to send to a friend at the click of a button. I am currently using Chilkat’s MailMan but I keep getting intermittent problems with it. It seems occassionaly on the first attempt to mail it throws a null pointer exception. Then if try the exact same page again it sends no problem.

• Are there any other components out
  there that will do what I am trying
  to do?
• Would it be easier to right my
  own light weight component to do it?
• Has anyone had the above problem that
  can be solved easily and then I don’t
  have to worry about the above?

EDIT:
Maybe I should clear something up. I know how to send emails. That is not the problem. The Chilkat component I was using could take in a webpage and put it into an email and send it. The person that receives it then has an email with all the CSS included and the pictures and everything in the email.

Answer 1

This is actually not a trivial exercise.

What you want to do, is download the HTML (which is the easy part). You then have to parse it, and extract all of the css references, and image references, and either:

1. Embed them into the email, or

2. Convert all links to absolute links.

When you look at all the bad HTML out there, you find out this isn’t trival. The reason why I know this, is I wrote this functionality into aspNetEmail (http://www.aspNetEmail.com), and had to account for all sorts of bad HTML.