C# mvc2 create an plain text email in code

Question

I need to create an plain-test email in code. This is required because the information in the email will be read by an application.

I've created the following value in an constant string as setup for my email. These are the fields that I want to be in the e-mail because the application requires them.

public static string TestMail = @"
[Begin Message]
Name = {0}
Phone = {1}
Postalcode = {2}
HomeNumber = {3}
[End message]";

When sending the email using the code below, the application which needs to read information from the email, receives it as following;

=0D=0A        [Begin Message]=0D=0A        Name =3D nam=
e=0D=0A        Phone =3D 0612345678=0D=0A        Postalcode =3D =
1234ab=0D=0A        HomeNumber =3D 5=0D=0A        [End messa=
ge]=0D=0A       =20

The code I used to send this email is as following;

var mailBody = String.Format(Constants.TestMail, name, phone, postalCode, homeNumber);

var mail = new MailMessage
{
    Subject = Constants.Subject,
    Body = mailBody,
    IsBodyHtml = false,
};

mail.To.Add(receveiver);

var smtpClient = new SmtpClient();
smtpClient.Send(mail);

This isn't the result I expected and after digging around a bit I found out that the problem lied in the fact that it still seems to be an HTML-email while I need it to be plain-text. While reading about this problem I found this example in VB.net on the internet. So i modified the constant to the one below;

public static string TestMail = @"[Begin message]\r\nName = {0}\r\nPhone = {1}\r\nPostalcode = {2}\r\nHomenumber = {3}\r\n[End message]";

Then I used the following code to create and sent the email to my client (testing in outlook)

var mail = new MailMessage
{
    Subject = Constants.Subject,
};
var alternateView = System.Net.Mail.AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(mailBody, Encoding.ASCII,"text/plain");

mail.AlternateViews.Add(alternateView);

mail.To.Add(receveiver);

var smtpClient = new SmtpClient();
smtpClient.Send(mail);

After running this code i'm receiving an email in my outlook (can't test the application at the moment) containing the content below;

[Start message]\r\nName = John\r\nPhone = 0612345678\r\nPostalcode = 1234ab\r\nHomeNumber = 5\r\n[End Message]

The last result doesn't seem an plain-text email to me. Is it just outlook 2007 having problems to show the email? Or am I still missing something? I hope someone can help me out here and can tell me what's going wrong.

Answer 1

You should remove @ character because then it will correctly handle escape characters. If you have @ then all escape characters are treated as a plain text instead of new line etc.