So, I needed to set up some email alerts from one of my web sites. Doing this with the .NET framework (in the past) hasn't been too incredibly hard - at least in terms of code. But configuring everything and debugging in that magical realm between .NET and CDOSYS/CDONTS has always been a royal pain in the butt. That, and there's nothing like worrying that some service pack to a server someday will shutdown your email functionality - without you knowing about it.

So I went with ASPNetEmail instead. To get it to work on my own dev server I decided to try and set up MailEnable as an SMTP server. MailEnable is free, was easy to set up, and totally did the trick.

Once that was set up, getting things running with ASPNetEmail was so easy I almost felt guilty. Better yet, because I had fat-fingered my allow relay urls in MailEnable I got to see why people won't shut up about how great ASPNetEmail is - as it gave me a very thorough set of exception details that let me know that it wasn't able to properly relay for me.

Best of all, I won't have to worry about my code/email functionality just deciding that it won't work in the future.