Sending Email from Classic ASP on Windows 2012 R2 Server Core

Question

We have a classic ASP application we just migrated from Windows 2008 R2 to Windows 2012 R2 Core.

Apparently Core versions of windows don't include cdosys or cdonts and thus our application can no longer send email.

Most of the advice I can find suggests using system.net.mail for sending email which of course is a .NET technology and we're using classic ASP.

We do have .NET on our system but I'm not sure if classic ASP could talk to a .NET page for sending email?

Besides using a 3rd party COM utility like Persits ASPEmail are there any native ways of working around this?

We do NOT want to convert the server core instance to the full version of windows. That's killing an ant with a bazooka. This is only impacting two places in our code and everything else works just fine on core.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, CDONTS was superseded by CDOSYS some time ago. When migrating from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 I had this exact same issue, but managed to find a fix .

It involves taking a copy of the cdonts.dll file from the Windows Server 2008 Server and adding it to the Windows Server 2012 server then registering it with the relevant COM subsystem without any need to change code or install a 3rd Party library.

Hopefully the same method will work with Core but I haven't tested it.