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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T19:51:23+00:00

I need to be able to pass HTML data into Outlook like this: MailMessage

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I need to be able to pass HTML data into Outlook like this:

MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
message.Body = myBody;

Initially, I thought I could pass plain text to it and use PadLeft like this:

somestring.PadLeft(100);

but it did not align everything properly because even though ||||| and MMMMM are both only 5 characters in length, they physically on the screen take up more space.

My solution is to convert data that is in my datatable into an HTML table and then pass it into Outlook.

  1. how do I convert a datatable into an html table?
  2. is there a better solution to my issue?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Loop over your DataTable, and build up the html string. IE:

    DataTable dt = new DataTable();

dt.Columns.Add("col1");
dt.Columns.Add("col2");
dt.Columns.Add("col3");
dt.Rows.Add(new object[] { "a", "b", "c" });
dt.Rows.Add(new object[] { "d", "e", "f" });

string tab = "\t";

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

sb.AppendLine("<html>");
sb.AppendLine(tab + "<body>");
sb.AppendLine(tab + tab + "<table>");

// headers.
sb.Append(tab + tab + tab + "<tr>");

foreach (DataColumn dc in dt.Columns)
{        
    sb.AppendFormat("<td>{0}</td>", dc.ColumnName);        
}

sb.AppendLine("</tr>");

// data rows
foreach (DataRow dr in dt.Rows)
{
    sb.Append(tab + tab + tab + "<tr>");

    foreach (DataColumn dc in dt.Columns)
    {
        string cellValue = dr[dc] != null ? dr[dc].ToString() : "";
        sb.AppendFormat("<td>{0}</td>", cellValue);
    }

    sb.AppendLine("</tr>");
}

sb.AppendLine(tab + tab + "</table>");
sb.AppendLine(tab + "</body>");
sb.AppendLine("</html>");
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