Scott's Blog

Sending Email using Exchange 2007 Web Services (EWS) is a little trickier than I first anticipated (read: counterintuitive), since it uses the service.CreateItem() method call instead of the service.SendItem().  The basic idea is to formulate the email message as a CreateItemType with a MessageType assigned to the Item property, with the MessageDisposition set to "MessageDispositionType.SendAndSaveCopy."  The following code shows an example of a library method that can send a basic email message with no attachments from a sender to a single recipient (it should be fairly easy to extrapolate multiple recipients, cc's & bcc's from there).

The first step with any EWS call is to set up your Exchange Service Binding:

ExchangeServiceBinding esb = new ExchangeServiceBinding();

esb.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(config.UserName, config.Password, config.Domain);

esb.Url = config.ServerURL;

Next, create the root MessageType that will serve as your email message:

MessageType emailMessage = new MessageType();

Now you can add the from/sender as a SingleRecipientType (there can't be multiple senders), and add the ToRecipients as an array of EmailAddressTypes.  I'll also show the body and subject code since it is relatively straightforward.

//Add the sender/recipient to the email message

emailMessage.ToRecipients = new EmailAddressType[1];

emailMessage.ToRecipients[0] = new EmailAddressType();

emailMessage.ToRecipients[0].EmailAddress = "recipient@email.com"; //Currently there is only one recipient

emailMessage.From = new SingleRecipientType();  //set up a single sender

emailMessage.From.Item = new EmailAddressType();

emailMessage.From.Item.EmailAddress = "sender@email.com";

emailMessage.Subject = "Subject Goes Here";

emailMessage.Body = new BodyType();

emailMessage.Body.BodyType1 = BodyTypeType.Text; //specify HTML or plain Text

emailMessage.Body.Value = "Body Goes Here";

The next step is to place the email message inside of a CreateItemType object.

CreateItemType emailToSave = new CreateItemType();

emailToSave.Items = new NonEmptyArrayOfAllItemsType();

emailToSave.Items.Items = new ItemType[1];

emailToSave.Items.Items[0] = emailMessage;

emailToSave.MessageDisposition = MessageDispositionType.SendAndSaveCopy;

emailToSave.MessageDispositionSpecified = true;

Finally, you call the CreateItem() method to create the item and send it off.  I'll usually place this part in a try/catch block, and then return the ResponseCode (inside of the returned ResponseMessageType) so that it can be inspected for success.

CreateItemResponseType response = esb.CreateItem(emailToSave);

// Get the response messages.

ResponseMessageType[] rmta =  response.ResponseMessages.Items;

Regardless of the complexities, it sure beats WebDAV!