Sending HTML e-mail with embedded images (the correct way)
I've seen a couple posts on this before but they all seem to miss out a critical piece of code that without, causes the images to be embedded but they do not display correctly in some e-mail clients (such as Outlook 2003/2007). The following code will make it work across a number of clients I've tested it with and I've also thrown in a basic way to have a plain text e-mail attached as well in case the client does not support HTML.
Disclaimer: I've chosen to use the media type of JPEG, it's not ideal but it's something I threw together to get the main point across. You should really get the file extension and use a switch statement for the different media types.
public static void SendMessageWithEmbeddedImages()
{
string htmlMessage = @"<html>
<body>
<img src='cid:EmbeddedContent_1' />
</body>
</html>";
SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("mail.server.com");
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage("[email protected]",
"[email protected]");
// Create the HTML view
AlternateView htmlView = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(
htmlMessage,
Encoding.UTF8,
MediaTypeNames.Text.Html);
// Create a plain text message for client that don't support HTML
AlternateView plainView = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(
Regex.Replace(htmlMessage,
"<[^>]+?>",
string.Empty),
Encoding.UTF8,
MediaTypeNames.Text.Plain);
string mediaType = MediaTypeNames.Image.Jpeg;
LinkedResource img = new LinkedResource(@"C:\Images\MyImage.jpg", mediaType);
// Make sure you set all these values!!!
img.ContentId = "EmbeddedContent_1";
img.ContentType.MediaType = mediaType;
img.TransferEncoding = TransferEncoding.Base64;
img.ContentType.Name = img.ContentId;
img.ContentLink = new Uri("cid:" + img.ContentId);
htmlView.LinkedResources.Add(img);
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
msg.AlternateViews.Add(plainView);
msg.AlternateViews.Add(htmlView);
msg.IsBodyHtml = true;
msg.Subject = "Some subject";
client.Send(msg);
}
I couldn't find this information anywhere but I tried setting a whole bunch of things until the images displayed correctly, hope this helps someone with the same issues.
Expect to see this feature in my Command Line E-mailer application so that sending HTML e-mails appear the way you designed them locally when they arrive at the recipient.

The conversation
19 commentsThanks.
Excelente trabajo amigo, funciona a la perfección.
La mejor explicación que he encontrado.
Felicitacioes !!!
Muchas Gracias :-)