Email Sender for Asp.NET 5.0 Identity using SendGrid

How to send activation and password reset emails for Asp.NET 5.0 Identity using SendGrid.

IEmailSender

In multiple Identity scenarios, I need to send my users an email; when they create their account and need activation email, when they change the password, when there is suspicious activity on their account, etc., and hence we need a central email function to take care of this.

With Microsoft Asp.NET Identity, comes an interface called IEmailSender, with only one method to implement — SendEmailAsync. However this service is primarily intended for their default UI infrastructure, and should not be used from within our code.

For that reason, I create my own email service, and use SendGrid helper classes to call their API and send the emails.

Libraries

SendGrid provides the below helper library to integrate with their services:

• SendGrid

By the way, this topic belongs to the series to set up Authentication and Authorisation for Asp.NET ecosystem.

1. Asp.Net Core Web Api Setup
2. React Single Page App Setup
3. Asp.NET Identity DB Setup
4. Email Sender
5. Sign Up & Activation
6. Check User Authentication Status
7. Change Password
8. Sign In
9. Policy Based Access Management
10. Token Refresh
11. Google Authentication with React and Asp.NET API
12. Microsoft Authentication with React and Asp.NET API
13. Twitter Authentication with React and Asp.NET API

End Result

At the end any function that would need to send an email, would work with an interface like this:

in which the EmailRequest class looks like below. I have chosen Tuple as a simple structure to send the name and email of sender and recipients.

Implementation

The implementation is pretty simple, using MailHelper class of SendGrid. I am using one the exposed methods, CreateSingleEmailToMultipleRecipients, but the library comes with multiple methods you could leverage to send your emails.

The point that is worth highlighting is the use of AppSecrets class. It is the class that I use to organise and structure my secrets. If you’d like to read more about that, refer to Secret Management in ASP.Net 5.0 Web APIs.

Note

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