Our e-commerce site requires the sending of email
Currently, for some odd reason, the server that is being used to do this is the database server... which clearly isn't ideal (i've just taken over here)
My idea is this -
to write a windows service that checks for new mails that need sending (these are all in a sql db) and then process the mails seperately...
I want to use a seperate mail server, to keep this efficient..
Has anyone had any experience of this?
Would it be sensible to (for example) set up a lightweight debian (or other distro) machine, with exim on?
Would i be able to use that as the host ip address when specifying my smtp server to send email?
I'm going to be using C#....
I've done this quite a bit, and sometimes I've used a windows server running the SMTP service, other times we've used a third party. In either case you set the host of the mail server in the configuration file and your application can pick it up and continue working.
A nice thing about using a third party service, is that you should have less concern about being black listed.
We did something very similar. We used the IIS SMTP server and wrote code in C# to pump messages directly into its pickup directory using SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis. systemnetmail.com has some sample code that may help you.
One thing to be careful of is race conditions in the database, especially if you are sending messages with more than one thread (which we were doing). We implemented a queue in the database and used the UPDLOCK and READPAST hints in SQL Server for maximum performance. I think we got it up to over 10,000 emails a minute this way.
You can use the Windows SMTP server wich you can access and use from your web or console application using the CDOSYS or CDO object. You can use this link about configuring the SMTP server on Windows 2003
Related
I work with a dozen pieces of equipment whose operating software has the option to send e-mails on error. I would prefer to capture the details of that e-mail on the host PCs that run them (i.e. for logging, communicating details automatically via Slack, etc.) rather than them going to an inbox somewhere.
Is there a way to have the software e-mail an address that is essentially a lightweight piece of code running on the same PC mimicking something like an SMTP server (that will allow me to get after the message's contents)? Other solutions I have seen are along the lines of setting up a full-blown server which seems like overkill.
You may configure SmtpClient to save email to a specific folder instead of sending it over the wire. Check this answer.
Also you must design your system in the way it could work with different implementations of your 'sender', so that you can replace it when you need that, for example during testing. In this case you can easily provide proxy implementation that will capture email content and then send it to localhost, or add aspects (make retries, logs performance...).
What needs to be done for an application to be able to issue email addresses, such as user123#mydomain.com?
I'm using Amazon SES to send out emails, do they have a service for this or would this have to do with the domain registrar (GoDaddy), or both?
The client to check email would be the web application itself.
I'm using C#.Net and Mvc for that as far as development is concerned but would prefer to use existing SaaS wherever possible.
What are some good ways to go?
EDIT: I checked with GoDaddy and they can't do this at scale. I don't believe Amazon does this either. How is this done?
This would all depend on your implementation of email server host. If you are running Windows with IIS and Email Post office then users are of the host domain. You can use the admin scripts for adding users from the site in this case.
If you are using Linux and a thrid party email service, it will likely have a user interface for adding users. Howerver these implementations generally use MySQL on the backend so you can add users through script from an implementation of PHP through Apache webserver host or backend service that adds users through MySQL script.
You need a mail server. As you can see from the list there are plenty of mail servers that exist, however there are some serious leaders in the field:
According to one survey, sendmail, Microsoft Exchange Server, Postfix,
and Exim together control over 85% of market share for SMTP service in
2010.1
I strongly recommend not hosting such a server in your code (if an implementation even exists, which I couldn't find)
After configuration of the mail server (which may need some intensive investment either in time or money, since this is complicated; some mail servers are notoriously complicated) you point your domain to the mail server. Mails can now be received to the email adresses you define.
This process is complicated, and I have a feeling that your question shows you don't know exactly what you need either (In fact I would have recommended closing it as too broad). I'd recommend reformulating exactly what you need and what you have so far. Don't hesitate to get in touch with someone that may help you formulate your needs.
I want to pass certain parameters to a desktop application remotely via the internet. I don't want my application to contact the server repeatedly, because many such applications can bring the server down easily. Is there a way to initiate the connection from the server? How can I identify the applications, as there will many of them running on many computers somewhere around the globe. I don't know where to start - I'm trying to do this in C# and ASP.NET/PHP on the server-side. Please give some advice.
Is there a way to initiate the connection from the server?
No. Not without having the client contact with the server first, informing it with the IP address, port to use etc... Which the server will need to keep for each client, hoping that they don't change (or get updated when they do change).
Long polling by the client is the right solution for what you are doing, even if you don't want to use it.
There are many different ways you could approach this, just thinking out of the box, both your app and the server could utilize a different mechanism for transferring the settings. I'm not recommending any of these methods, please don't shoot me down, they are all just ideas.
As an example, your server could connect out using FTP and output the updated settings to an FTP server on each PC. You could install something like Filezilla on each machine which runs your app. You'd obviously need to configure port forwarding on the router to allow the server FTP access.
You could use email. Setting up an email account where your server can login to send out the settings. Your app could possibly login to the same email account possibly even a single Gmail account to retrieve the settings.
Another idea would be to use a file sharing service like Dropbox, Google Drive or similar and where the settings could be shared. Obviously this would involve learning any API and I'm not sure if there are any restrictions on this approach.
The last idea and probably my preferred approach would be to host a web service and database on a remote server, both your server and the applications would connect to the same service to transfer the settings. This approach is obviously firewall/router friendly as all the clients connect out to the web service to collect the required data.
Hope this helps?
I am using SmtpClient and MailMessage to send emails from ASP.Net code.
I want to be able to delay the delivery of emails based on business logic.
I will be able to generate a DateTime object about when the email should actually be delivered.
I am aware that I can create a Windows Service to schedule email delivery using Sql Server database as an email storage. But I do not want to deploy an extra service on the hosting server.
I am also aware that I can create a SQL Server job to achieve this, but I would not like to, until and unless, this cannot be achieved using pure ASP.NET
A point to note is that, my code checks whether MSMQ is enabled on the server. If it is, MessageQueue class is used for email delivery. So any pointers on achieving this using queues will be helpful.
By the way, the solution should work in both cases (i.e. with SmtpClient as well as MessageQueue.
I have already reviewed this and this questions and its accepted answers. I do not want to use 3rd party products until and unless this cannot be achieved using pure ASP.NET
P.S. .Net Framework version : 3.5, IIS 7 and Sql Server 2008 should be the environment.
Some information about keeping a timer running in asp.net including a great comment about an always on scenario:
Start timer on web application start
You can use the following to keep asp.net from shutting down:
Can you prevent your ASP.NET application from shutting down?
You can simply use the timer to check a database and send all pending mail.
After some research and clarifications from client, it was decided that I should create a long running background thread, which will handle sending of emails at pre-defined times and need not bother about whether the application pool has been shut down due to inactivity.
I am writing you because of a new problem I need to solve, and I have now been banging my head against a wall for too long now.
Basically, I need to create an application that can take care of the following:
A user starts an app, which sends a broadcast to the subnet, and recieves a response of all servers there with their IP (and some additional info). The user can then select what server he wants to connect to.
Making it work is simple enough, with identifying the subnet, and broadcasting with UDP, and then having a different server application recieving it and sending back a response . The problem lies with these restrictions, that I need to take into consideration:
There will most likely also be clients on the server machines in the network, meaning that we can assume that the application is present on all machines. Every machine needs to have the listener running, and every machine can launch the GUI for selecting a server.
I am only allowed to add one exception to the firewall - an exception that handles both sending out the broadcasts, recieving broadcasts, sending answers and recieving answers.
I should also only be adding one Windows Service
on a server machine, the listener should run as a windows service, so the user won't notice it. Nor will the user notice, that the response is sent back to the client.
On the client machine, the user can start an application, which will notify the application to emmit the broadcast, and will get all the server responses, so the user can choose one to connect to.
Besides from the application that the user launches in order to select a server, there should be no interaction with the user whatsoever. Not even a popup, requesting the user to allow traffic trough the firewall - it should all be automatically
It needs to work on and in between Win XP, Win Vista and Win 7.
I don't know if I am putting too many constrains on myself, but I really hope that I can make the application with these requirements.
I have a few ideas - I just need to figure out how to do it:
Should i make everything into one application, that I add to the firewall exception list, so it will take care of the traffic on both the server and the client machines?
Should I add a custom exception to the firewall, allowing UDP traffic on a specific port, and then have all traffic flow trough that?
Is there a third and better option for managing that?
It is OK to have the service running on both client and server machines. But can it take care of everything for me - like it handling both the broadcast send/recieve and answer send/recieve? And is there any way to extract the information about servers on the network from a service?
I know it is a lot, but I really hope that you will be able to help me out.
let me know if I wasn't clear enough, or if you need further explanations.
I am coding in C# .Net, and I can utilize all I want from the .Net framework. As soon as I have this functionality implemented
All the best
/Sagi
The kind of peer-to-peer networking problems become simple to the point of being trivial if you designate one machine as the master server. It should have a well-known name that all sub-servers can connect to so they can publish (and withdraw) their availability. A client can then send a query request to the same server and get a list of known servers in return.
This can also solve your firewall problem, the master server could be listening on port 80.
Look into the System.Net.PeerToPeer namespace for a p2p solution supported by the framework.
Maybe a UPnP server and client may be a solution to your problem?