Update: More on this story here.

I've been playing around with an email tool that I've created to send out emails to NNUG members. It's just a simple command line tool sending an email to each person in a list to avoid using bcc which sometimes get hooked in a spam filter. Another thing this tool does is to take an html page (an html formatted email), scan it for images and embed the images using the AlternateView class and its LinkedResources collection for sending as an html email.

The emails sent by this tool looked ok in Outlook, Gmail and Hotmail on every test I did. Except for when I decided to use the tool to send out an official NNUG invitation to 300 members! The only change I had done was adding one extra image. I noticed that the email I got on my Hotmail account had a wrong image at the end. The image used was the same as the second image in the email. The reason was not hard to find.

When I add images to the LinkedResources collection, I name the images/files nnug[someNumber].jpg like this:

nnug0.jpg, nnug1.jpg, nnug2.jpg etc.

This worked fine for all images up to nnug10.jpg. Can you see why nnug10.jpg did not work and what the bug is? The last image that was supposed to be nnug10 was showing up as the second image instead (nnug1). E.g. nnug10 = nnug1! Hmmm.... Come on!

Then my apology. To all members of NNUG with a registered Hotmail account and to Christian Weyer:

I'm sorry that I did not discover this bug before, so I could have changed my algorithm. Sorry to you Christian for being nnug1.jpg! You replaced the NNUG logo, resulting in the email ending with:

  Kind regards [image of Christian]

instead of

  Kind regards (image of NNUG logo)

...giving the email a bit different meaning than I intended

Btw. don't forget to sign up for the NNUG events by Christian Weyer and Dan North 25th and 27th August!