Send email via C++ program

In C++, you' use winsock, and ask the user for their ISP's SMTP servers address. For instance mine is smtp.blueyonder.co.uk. You can then connect to that address on port 25 and send SMTP commands to send the E-Mail. Here's an example transaction (Lines sent by the app are prefixed with "> ", and lines sent by the server are prefixed with "< "):

It's fairly easy, and you can mostly get my with trial and error. If you desperately want to try sending mail using trial and error, I have a mail server (one I wrote myself) running at thetavern.servebeer.com, port 25. It'll accept all mail directed to someone @thetavern.servebeer.com.

Of course it's entirely possible that .NET has a function to send mail for you or something...

I dont want to have to ask the user for their server address, since I myself dont know what are my server address.
I will have to do with perhaps openning the default email program and filling it with the desired information? Is that possible? How do I do that?

This seems to work for me:
ShellExecute(NULL,"open","mailto:Steve@moo.com",NULL,"C:\\",SW_SHOWNORMAL);
You can probably append stuff like "&subject=Blah" or whatever, just as you do in a HTML link. I don't know if you can actually fill the message with information however.

Actually, this works fine:
ShellExecute(NULL,"open","mailto:Steve@moo.com?subject=My Subject&body=This is the message here",NULL,"C:\\",SW_SHOWNORMAL);

One last thing, how do I break a line inside the body text?

Evil Steve, that was a great explanation (post above), never knew that e-mail was that easy.. Hehe..

When I write the ...body=text" part, I would like to break down the lines.
However putting /r/n in the text does not break down the lines in the email program. How would I cause that the text in the body will be presented in the email program with line breaks?

Quote:

Original post by The C modest god I dont want to have to ask the user for their server address, since I myself dont know what are my server address. I will have to do with perhaps openning the default email program and filling it with the desired information? Is that possible? How do I do that?

If you don't need the user's e-mail, you can instead link into your own SMTP server and send an e-mail to yourself.

Perhaps the HTML-tag BR would work? Anyway, some e-mail clients support multiple body vars which will end up as seperate lines:

&body=line1&body=line2..

I was told that SMPT is too low level for what I need and that I should use MAPI instead?
I looked for it in msdn but it says on all the results that the document is not found.
How can I use MAPI to achieve sending email?
Is there an other newer windows commands/interface I can use to achieve sending email?

Quote:

Original post by Pipo DeClown Perhaps the HTML-tag BR would work? Anyway, some e-mail clients support multiple body vars which will end up as seperate lines: &body=line1&body=line2..

Yeah, Google came up with that, but Outlook Express doesn't support it (it only sets the body to the last body= line), so thats a bit of a bummer.

I've never used MAPI, but I can't see it being much different from using a direct socket connection to the mail server. If you have a reasonable socket class, it's easy enough to parse a response line and to send what you need.

Actually, most mail servers require authentication, which require you to "log in" using the AUTH smtp command. Also note that you need to send the password in base64 encoded format (can't remember the specifics, it was a while ago when I experimented around with this stuff).