How to access the Outbound SMTP Server address from code?

Question

I am currently working on sending an email with an iCal event that users can accept/decline to add it to their calendar. The built-in SPUtility.SendEmail is too limited to achieve this so I'm using SmtpClient instead. However, I've needed to hard code the Outbound SMTP Server shown in the image below because I've been unable to find this property from the SharePoint API:

This is obviously going to cause problems when the Outbound SMTP server changes because I will have to remember to update it in 2 places. How can I access this property using the SharePoint API?

Answer 1

I found an article by Randy Drisgill that describes how to get the SMTP server by using the SPWebApplication.

The one-line code to get the property is SPContext.Current.Web.Site.WebApplication.OutboundMailServiceInstance.Server.Address.