Question

I’m thinking of implementing “Report a bug/Suggestions” option to my game, however I am not quite sure how I could get that working. I do not have my own server or anything, so I can’t just send the text that user has written to there.

The only way I came up with is that the client would write a message and I would send it to an email account where I could read them. However, I do not want that users would need to send the reports through their personal accounts. I am not quite sure how I could implement this and googling didn’t bring up any good suggestions.

I haven’t done a lot of network stuff, so I’d really appreciate it if you could explain ( possibly even in code ) the process step-by-step.

I am using C# and the game is being programmed for Windows Phone 7.

Answer 1

Yes, it is absolutely possible to do that. From a relatively low-level perspective, you need to:

1. Resolve the MX (mail-exchanger) server for the e-mail account you want to send to.
2. Open a socket to the MX server.
3. Send the appropriate SMTP commands to cause the e-mail message to be delivered to your recipient account. You essentially have the freedom to set the "from" address to be any arbitrary thing you want.

SMTP is a very simple/human-friendly protocol, so it’s not a massive effort to do all of that by hand. At the same time, there are prebuilt libraries that will handle all of that for you (except possibly the resolution of the recipient’s MX server).

Note that emails sent this way are more likely to be filtered out as spam (generally because the sender’s IP/hostname is not going to match whatever domain you put on the outgoing e-mail address you decide to use).

Also note that since you can set the "from" address to anything, you have the option of asking the user if they want to provide their actual contact address, and if they do you can make that the "from" address so that you can actually get back in touch with them if necessary.