CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#smtpsmtpclient
Donald Jansen
Donald Jansen

Reputation: 1985

SMTP Reply method

I am creating a WebMail client, but I have a question.
Sending mails are easy if just using SMTPClient, but how would I send a reply, for example if the user decides to reply to a message, Is it just basically copy the old body and append it to the new body that I am going to send or what is the better way to reply to a message

So what I bassicly want to do is

MailAddress replyto = new MailAddress("[email protected]");
replyto.What? = recievedmessage ID? (wich I get from my Imap Library)
replyto.Headers["whatgoeshere"] = recievedmessage ID? (wich I get from my Imap Library)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 965

Answers (2)

jstedfast
jstedfast

Reputation: 38593

To start with, the reply message should do the following things (which are all convention more than anything else):

  1. The replied message's To header should be set to the original message's Reply-To value, if set, otherwise to the From value.
  2. The reply message's Subject header should be set to the value of the original message's Subject header, but with a "Re: " prefix (unless it already has one).
  3. The reply message's In-Reply-To header should be set to the original message's Message-Id header value.
  4. The reply message's References header should be set to the original message's References header value with the original message's Message-Id value appended to it.

That takes care of the headers. For the message body, that will depend on whether the message body you are replying to is in text/plain or text/html format.

Since there's no real convention for text/html messages, I'll explain the convention for text/plain replies instead.

Normally, what you do, as the author of an email client is to construct a default reply text body in the following format:

On ${TIMESTAMP}, ${AUTHOR_NAME} wrote:

followed by the original message text with each line prefixed with "> " (greater-than space).

Depending on the mail client, the ${TIMESTAMP} string will be formatted differently, but it'll often be more-or-less the same format as the original message's Date header.

The author's name, of course, is taken from the parsed email address in the From header.

If you are auto-generating a reply to a message, it'll probably easiest to prepend the reply text to the "quoted" original message body text (which is often referred to as top-posting), but there are other styles that some people use when replying manually.

Upvotes: 2

Techie Joe
Techie Joe

Reputation: 867

In my experiences it's up to you as long as the new message is properly formatted according to the SMTP RFC you're free to do what you want. SMTP is essentially a relay agent, not a mail sevrer.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions