Sending email from ASP.NET MVC

I'm writing a user registration process in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC, and I'd like to send a confirmation email to the user during that process. I know I can do this using the classes in the System.Net.Mail namespace, but I have a few questions on the best way to implement this.

1. Before I go down the path of writing my own code to send email, are there any existing solutions like ActionMailer for ASP.NET MVC?

2. If I do roll my own, should I do this on the web server during the request and would using Send bog down the web server, tying up threads as they wait开发者_开发问答 on the SMTP server to respond? If so, would SendAsync be preferable?

3. Would it be better pull this out of ASP.NET MVC entirely, maybe by writing a record to a database table and having a windows service periodically sweep the table and send out the messages?

At the moment, I am leaning towards #3, since that would give me the flexibility of doing this work on another server entirely, but was wondering what others are doing. Are there options and/or issues I haven't considered?

Personally I would agree that #3 is your best option. It's the most complex of the three, but none of them are terribly complex. What it does do, however, is:

1. Give you a record of all emails sent by the system.
2. Remove the dependency of the email system from the live application. (Separation of concerns is always fun.)
3. Provide a natural re-try mechanism when the email system dependency is failing.

As for an existing library for making the creation/sending of the MailMessage objects easier, I've never seen a need. If you're just sending the messages to an SMTP server, the built-in objects are more than adequate and easy to use.

MvcMailer is like an ActionMailer for .Net. See the NuGet package here and the project documentation

Hope it helps!