Send emails from SharePoint

Question

I'm new to SharePoint, and this might be an obvious thing, but I haven't stumbled across how to do it yet. I'm wondering if there's a way to easily send email to a addresses from a list. I.E., you load a contacts list in either site in a browser or SharePoint designer, select the contacts to which you wish to send an email. What specifically I want to happen after that, I'm unsure of (I.E., whether the site/designer loads an interface that allows you to type up the body/subject or this action spawns a new Outlook email with the selected addresses in the To line.)

Answer 1

You should take a look into SPUtility.SendEmail. This is basically what you'll need to send out emails from SharePoint if your SMTP settings are setup. As @DavidLozzi says there is no OOTB SharePoint functionality to do this.

Answer 2

There isn't anything out of the box, there are some 3rd party solutions available, or you could use SharePoint Designer for some basic functionality as well.

Answer 3

If you have the contacts in separate list. you can create a webpart which holds the contacts list emails/name in dropdown and subject and Body textboxes, then using SPUtility.SendMail method send the email to selected Users with your custom message.

Or

Create a separate list and associate a workflow which has send email action to send whenever a new item is created. In that List have a fields for subject and body and lookup field for user in contact list, based on the item values, that workflow can send email to the selected contact.

Answer 4

I've done the later before with a calculate column that concatenates a mail to hyperlink with the users email address. Sharepoint interprets the mailto as a clickable hyperlink and will use the local mail client. Easy, works well and the users liked it.