I was tasked with a tricky issue in sending emails. Due to security concerns, the client's IT team was not willing to share SMTP information for their mail settings and was only willing to set up an account in Outlook directly on a dedicated machine without sharing the password with us to send the emails. The client's ask was to send emails through Outlook without letting users see the emails or Outlook itself.

Sending emails through Outlook can be done using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook but the documentation is really lacking. If you need to do the same, I hope this will save you the hours of time it took me to figure out what ends up not being complex code.

Create a new desktop application project in Visual Studio. Install the Microsoft Office Interop for Outlook. I used the NuGet package manager to install it since it wasn't present on my system:

I created a static class to send the email through Outlook. Note that my error handling code was replaced with Debug.Writeline. Remember to modify it to handle errors or implement logging so it doesn't fail silently.

Email.cs:

Example on how to call the class:

email.html: