Question: is there any way **in MVC** to get the System.Net.Mail SendAsync to work, instead of the blocking Send method? 

I tried using it but hit the "Page starting an asynchronous operation has to have the Async attribute" error, which I obviously can't resolve (or can I?) because there is no ASPX page with an @Page directive where I could add the Async attribute.

Help is greatly appreciated :(

Answer: 
If you're using a third party service such as gmail to send your email and relying on `SendEmail` or `SendAsync` you may want to set up your own SMTP server which will then relay onto gmail. The benefit is that `SendEmail` will return much faster and you may be able to forget the whole async thing.

That way if gmail rejects you for whatever reason the email will still sit in your local queue.

This is a quick and dirty way to get somewhat reliable email sending setup.

[Instructions (not personally tested, but i did this years ago\*)](http://www.codingbliss.com/cb/?p=38) or [see this for Windows 7](https://serverfault.com/questions/64753/smtp-server-on-windows-7)

\*of course I only remembered i did this after spending a long time converting over to async :-(
You may want to consider putting the email into a database table and then have a daemon that sends out emails by processing the queue.

```
a) if youre not sending billions of emails you can have a log of what you sent
b) you can resend if something fails.

```

depends how important these emails are, but if theyre important from a business standpoint and mustnt get lost then you should use this approach.