The SMTP services has plagued me for several days now. Oddly enough, it started at work and followed me home. So after many hours wasted trying to diagnose the problems, I created a simple little console application that does nothing but send a test email with a timestamp.

There may be a tool that does this already, but it was simple to write and since some of the applications that were failing used .Net, I figured I would use .Net to create the testing application as well. So I have posted the EmailTest utility in the Free Code & Stuff section of this site for anyone else that may need something like this.

It is a console application that takes three parameters: servername, fromaddress, and toaddress. Currently it does not support authentication of any type and relies on the mail server having relay opened to the computer you are running the application from. Since I was testing public web sites, this configuration suited my needs.

Hopefully this will save some of you a little stress the next time you have issues sending mail.

Enjoy!