A few months ago, I wrote a small .NET application I've called the Send HTML Wizard. It was cool doing a bit of coding in C# again and actually finishing it.
Download Send HTML Wizard
To install, you just need to unzip and run. You will need the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 installed on your machine as well.
The wizard prompts you through five steps:
- Get your SMTP server information
- Get the path to an HTML file on your local hard disk
- Get the list of TO and CC recipients you want to send the message to
- Get the message subject line and alternative body text
- Send
Then it creates an email message using System.Net.Mail encoding the HTML file as the message body. It will embed any files that are linked using href=, src=, dynsrc= and background= tags. These embedded files don't even show up as attachments.
I originally did this for a friend to see whether we could embed video and play it in-situ within Outlook. It could be done with the dynsrc tag and IE 6 but IE 7 tighted up security and killed it. However, it's still useful as a way of sending HTML email. The other way is to use Outlook signature files.
The app is flagged as beta since that's the level of quality you can expect. I haven't done any extensive testing and don't plan any further releases.
The app makes use of the Wizard Framework dll by Divelements which is included in the zip file. It made it much easier to code and works well.