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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T11:14:58+00:00

We need the ability to send out automatic emails when certain dates occur or

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We need the ability to send out automatic emails when certain dates occur or when some business conditions are met. We are setting up this system to work with an existing ASP.NET website. I’ve had a chat with one of the other devs here and had a discussion of some of the issues.

Things to note:

  • All the information we need is already modelled in the ASP.NET website
  • There is some business-logic that is required for the email generation which is also in the website already

We decided that the ideal solution was to have a separate executable that is scheduled to run overnight and do the processing and emailing. This solution has 2 main problems:

  • If the website was updated (business logic or model) but the executable was accidentally missed then the executable could stop sending emails, or worse, be sending them based on outdated logic.
  • We are hoping to use something like this to use UserControls to template the emails, which I don’t believe is possible outside of an ASP.NET website

The first problem could have been avoided with build and deployment scripts (which we’re looking into at the moment anyway), but I don’t think we can get around the second problem.

So the solution we decided on is to have an ASP.NET page that is called regularly by SSIS and to have that do a set amount of processing (say 30 seconds) and then return. I know an ASP.NET page is not the ideal place to be doing this kind of processing but this seems to best meet our requirements. We considered spawning a new thread (not from the worker pool) to do the processing but decided that if we did that we couldn’t use the page returned to signify a success or failure. By processing within the page’s life-cycle we can use the page content to give an indication of how the processing went.

So the question is:
Are there any technical problems we might have with this set-up?

Obviously if you have tried something like this any reports of success/failure will be appreciated. As will suggestions of alternative set-ups.

Cheers,

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Don’t use the asp.net thread to do this. If the site is generating some information that you need in order to create or trigger the email-send then have the site write some information to a file or database.

    Create a Windows service or scheduled process that collects the information it needs from that file or db and run the email sending process on a completely seperate process/thread.

    What you want to avoid is crashing your site or crashing your emailer due to limitations within the process handler. Based on your use of the word “bulk” in the question title, the two need to be independent of each other.

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