How to send 1000+ emails per day using an ASP.NET Web site

Question

We have a website that requires to send 1000+ emails a day to all the customers who opted for the alerts. In couple of months time we are expecting to raise our customer base to 5,000 and so we may need to send 5000+ mails every day.

At the moment we are using GoDaddy email server(the email services associated with our domain) and it permits us to send only 250 mails a day. Which is far less than what we need.

Is there any cloud based service that allows us to send as many mails as we want? or do we have to install an email server on our dedicated hosting server?

Please suggest me the possible solutions to this problem as well as the software/services that are required.

Updated:We have Windows Services that run in the background to generate the required emails and send them using SmtpClient class. Our problem is restrictions imposed by GoDaddy(only 250 emails per day)

Answer 1

There are a number of different solutions out there. If you want to send all the emails you want you will need to get a good reputation with all the Email Providers like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail. This can be quite difficult since they do everything according to IPs and getting a fixed IP in a cloud can be difficult.

You can use providers, like smartFOCUS DIGITAL, to send the emails for you and they take care of the reputation with the ESPs.

Answer 2

If you can't or don't want to install your own mail server, then one option is to lookup the MX records for the destination mail servers, and do the delivery directly from your application using the SmtpClient class.

Ideally, you should do this from a background thread (a Windows Service would be even better), to minimize interference with the rest of your web site.

IIRC, MX DNS lookups aren't available as a standard Framework call. However, they are pretty easy to add using p/invoke.

Answer 3

Easy solution is not to use a website to send all these emails just use a desktop application.

No dedicated server in a cloud is needed, an smtp server installed will do. Well that and a bulk email component like: aspnetmail

Answer 4

I suggest you to use your own mail server. Some email servers set to check sender mail server is authorized to send email. I mean sender email server must be authorised to send your domain's emails. Otherwise receipent email server drops emails.

Answer 5

Just install Mailenable on your server. Its free, and very easy to install and use: http://www.mailenable.com/standard%5Fedition.asp We use it on all our 10+ servers. The free version is totally sufficient for this purpose.

Answer 6

While this question is a bit dated. I have recently undergone a search for a host, and stumbled onto JodoHost.com. They have a reseller program in which you can have a domain classified as a 'mass mailer'. You have to sign a waiver stating that you won't use it for spam, but they give you 'unlimited' emails.

You will want to verify with them that 5000+ emails won't be an issue.

Now outside of finding a host that will allow you to send this many emails (as many ISP's will prevent this number as well), you have two options.

1. Invest in a dedicated server. This way you can host as many sites as you'd like on your server and send as many emails as you want. MailEnable is a perfectly suitable application to use, though its free version is limited to one domain. With this option, your cost will rise significantly over cheap GoDaddy hosting.
2. Use a third party service to send your mass mails. A prior employer had a list of 40,000+ users and we used a third party service to manage our list. That way they are responsible for a lot of the details to managing a list that size (add,remove, spam complaints, etc..)