In Web Applications, we often come across requirement of sending and receiving emails through our application. So same can be for the applications hosted on Azure.

So Do you want to send email from an application hosted on Azure? CloudMail is one of the possible answers.

CloudMail is designed to provide a small, effective and reliable solution for sending email from the Azure platform directly addressing several problems that application developers face.

Microsoft does not provide an SMTP Gateway (yet) so the application is forced to connect directly to one hosted somewhere else, on another network. So to implement such functionality one of the possible option is using Free email providers. This might be fine for testing, but do you really want to rely on a free service in production? There can be other issues with this approach like if your chosen SMTP gateway is down or there are connection problems? Again there can be some specific requirement that, you want to send email via a company’s mail server, from inside their firewall.

CloudMail solves these problems by providing a small client library that you can use in your solution to send emails from you application and a Windows Service that you run inside your companies network that acts as a relay. Because the send and relay are disconnected there are no lost emails and you can send from your own SMTP Gateway.

CloudMail is in its Beta version and available for download here.