Mass mail - newsletter, NOT SPAMMING

[Greg9Strat]

I'm trying to figure out the best strategy for sending out an email to
roughly 2,000 contacts. I have an html file that will be the body of
the email and a SQL database containing the contact list of emails.
These emails are our newsletters that get sent out each time there is
something noteworthy (so this happens on average about 3 times each
month...).

I envision creating an email object in .NET and setting the body text
and subject as static items and then iterating through the database for
email addresses. For each email address, the application should send,
and then clear the To field for the next entry... individual emails is
chosen mostly because of SPAM filters looking for an empty TO and all
recipients are in BCC field...

My question now is whether I should do this on an ASP.NET page, or
should I make this a standalone application (like console or WinForms)?
We have an Exchange server that already is fairly consumed throughout
the day (on a dual CPU w/ 2GB RAM, so it's fairly robust), and I'm
concerned about the performance hit on the mail server that will most
likely affect internal users.

However, if I choose to go with a console application, I could thread
it to delay the sending of messages in order to reduce the impact of
flooding the server...

Any feedback would be appreciated and helpful - thanks!!
Greg

 

[Mark Rae]

I envision creating an email object in .NET and setting the body text
and subject as static items and then iterating through the database for
email addresses. For each email address, the application should send,
and then clear the To field for the next entry... individual emails is
chosen mostly because of SPAM filters looking for an empty TO and all
recipients are in BCC field...

That's the way I do it.

My question now is whether I should do this on an ASP.NET page, or
should I make this a standalone application (like console or WinForms)?

IMO, the latter - no question.

We have an Exchange server that already is fairly consumed throughout
the day (on a dual CPU w/ 2GB RAM, so it's fairly robust), and I'm
concerned about the performance hit on the mail server that will most
likely affect internal users.

However, if I choose to go with a console application, I could thread
it to delay the sending of messages in order to reduce the impact of
flooding the server...

Any feedback would be appreciated and helpful - thanks!!

Well, one simple question first: is it vitally important that they are sent
at a specific time, and they they are all sent as near to that specific time
as possible? If not, then when not schedule them to be sent when your mail
server is at its least busy, maybe overnight? If you can't do this, how
about sending one, say every 5 seconds until they're all sent?

 

[Marina Levit [MVP]]

It depends on how this needs to be structured.

Ideally, you would put this code in some sort of class that can spawn
threads, etc. It would also raise an event when it is all done, so if an
application is waiting to hear when everything is done (like a windows app),
it can get the event.

You could then use the class from a console app, a windows app, or a windows
service. Which of these you chose really depends on if you need user
interaction to get the whole thing started, or if this is something that
always happens every tuesday, for instance. In any case, if the code is
isolated from the front end, you should be pretty safe in case you want to
switch later, or add featuers.

 

[Greg9Strat]

Thanks for your response, Mark.

I thought about scheduling it at night, but many of the users in our
company have BlackBerries - so I don't want to crash the mailserver
overnight... maybe I'm being too paranoid??? Would 2K emails be
considered a heavy load for an Exchange server?

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

re:

Would 2K emails be considered a heavy load for an Exchange server?

Not at all. Exchange won't even breathe hard while doing that.

Every month, I send over 1,000 emails to registered members of my spanish-language
asp.net discussion board in about 4 minutes...and that's using my own smtp server,
which is much less efficient than Exchange.

I use an http interface, though ( the mails are sent from an ASP.NET page ).
I'm not sure of there's any performance gains by sending from a Windows Forms app.

 

[Mark Rae]

I thought about scheduling it at night, but many of the users in our
company have BlackBerries - so I don't want to crash the mailserver
overnight... maybe I'm being too paranoid???

Perhaps paranoid is not quite the right adjective, but over-cautious
certainly... The fact that many of your users have Blackberries is of no
significance here.

Would 2K emails be considered a heavy load for an Exchange server?

Goodness me no! As Juan mentioned, that's nothing at all. But that's not
really what you're asking, I think...

It probably doesn't matter too much what technology you use to do your
mailouts, and I guess that decision will be heavily influenced by your own
infrastructure, so you will need to decide what is the best fit for you.

I maintain lots of sites for lots of clients, and offer a mailshot service
to them all. My ISP allows me to relay through their mail server, so I wrote
a WinForms app which allows me to specify the mailing list and then schedule
the mailshot. I wrote a WinForms app to do this because I couldn't see any
reason not to, and couldn't see any advantage in writing it as a WebForms
app, though it would have worked just as well..

 

[Edwin Knoppert]

I used the Windows task..manager? (don't know the english name)
And executes a simple win32 app which does an urldownload to file which
triggers our ASP.NET website.
This can then run as service since MSIE can not run when not logged in.

However i would like to know how to send bulkmail while the html contents
are unique per address.
Each email is personalized.
We currently send one by one during night.
In between a few secs pause, we had smtp troubles when sent right afgter
each other.