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: 
It looks like you want [Asynchronous support for ASP.NET MVC](http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AsyncMvc). See also "[Extend ASP.NET MVC for Asynchronous Action](http://weblogs.asp.net/jeffreyzhao/archive/2009/01/30/extend-asp-net-mvc-for-asynchronous-action.aspx)".

[This SO question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/275545/does-asp-net-mvc-framework-support-asynchronous-page-execution) is also relevant.
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.