Receiving an auto-generated email is often unpleasant, but when deployed correctly, they can be useful for both customers and companies. C# and SQL make it easy to grab information from a database and send customized emails with little effort.

Step one: grab the data.

Before sending emails, information from the database, like email addresses, needs to be collected by a query. A SQL query is just a string that asks a database for a specific table, but users should be able to dynamically change it depending on their needs.  As such, certain lines need to be flexible.  In the past, I had used string formatting to insert text into the query, which looks like the following: