MailMessage.AlternateViews Property
Assembly: System (in system.dll)
Use the AlternateViews property to specify copies of an e-mail message in different formats. For example, if you send a message in HTML, you might also want to provide a plain text version in case some of the recipients use e-mail readers that cannot display HTML content.
To add an alternate view to a MailMessage object, create an Attachment for the view, and then add it to the collection returned by AlternateViews. Use the Body property to specify the text version and use the AlternateViews collection to specify views with other MIME types. Use the MediaTypeNames class members to specify the MIME type for the alternate view.
The following code example demonstrates creating and sending an e-mail message with a plain text and an HTML alternate view.
public static void CreateMessageWithMultipleViews(string server, string recipients) { // Create a message and set up the recipients. MailMessage message = new MailMessage( "jane@contoso.com", recipients, "This e-mail message has multiple views.", "This is some plain text."); // Construct the alternate body as HTML. string body = "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN\">"; body += "<HTML><HEAD><META http-equiv=Content-Type content=\"text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\">"; body += "</HEAD><BODY><DIV><FONT face=Arial color=#ff0000 size=2>this is some HTML text"; body += "</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>"; // Add the alternate body to the message. AlternateView alternate = new AlternateView(body, MediaTypeNames.Text.Html); message.AlternateViews.Add(alternate); // Send the message. SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient(server); client.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials; client.Send(message); // Display the values in the ContentType for the attachment. ContentType c = alternate.ContentType; Console.WriteLine("Content type"); Console.WriteLine(c.ToString()); Console.WriteLine("Boundary {0}", c.Boundary); Console.WriteLine("CharSet {0}", c.CharSet); Console.WriteLine("MediaType {0}", c.MediaType); Console.WriteLine("Name {0}", c.Name); Console.WriteLine("Parameters: {0}", c.Parameters.Count); foreach (DictionaryEntry d in c.Parameters) { Console.WriteLine("{0} = {1}", d.Key, d.Value); } Console.WriteLine(); alternate.Dispose(); }
Windows 98, Windows Server 2000 SP4, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP Starter Edition
The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 is supported on Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP1.This appears to be inaccurate. The AlternateView class does not have a constructor that takes a string as the first argument and a media type as the second. This throws an error when I try it, because it treats the body variable as a file name and attempts to find said file.
Here's the fix:
AlternateView alternate = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(body, null, MediaTypeNames.Text.Html);
Courtesy of Mike Pope's site:
