Emailing problem

[Mike Grace]

Hi,

I am writing a web site which sends order confirmations to users via email.

Two changes that are needed are as follows:

1) PDF files are going to be attached to the email. It could be one, it
could be 20!

I have written the code to attach any number of PDF files to the
confirmation email, but the resulting email could be too big for some email
servers. Also the time it takes to generate can leave the user (in the
browser) wondering in the application has crashed.

I was thinking of "chopping" up the emails into several parts e.g. part 1 is
the text confirmation, then parts 2 onwards would contain each PDF.

This would get around the size issue but I would still be left with the
slowdown issue.

If I started the email generation in another thread, would the user get the
"Thank you for your order" page immediately and then be safe to close the
browser leaving the other thread doing it's work. Obviously the ASP.NET app
is still running on the web server anyway.

What would be the best way to deal with both these issues?

2) directly emailing a 'proof' to a user via email client.

When the user clicks on an 'email PDF' button, I need to create an email
with the pdf attached and invoke that users email client so that they can
then choose a recipient and add extra text before sending it.

How do I create an email message and invoke the users email client in .net?

I am guessing that I would not be using webmail.
Thanks in advance