Sending Programmatic Email Messages

Question

I'm looking to send email messages programmatically from my websites. For example, if people register their email address, I would like to email them to confirm their email address. To do this I will need to use an email sending tool and plug into an smtp service. In the past (7 or so years ago) I used Jmail, however, I am not sure what are the best services to use today and how spam filters have envolved!

I have three specific questions:

1. Does it matter which service I use to send emails programmatically (e.g., PhpMail, Jmail, etc.)? If so, which tools would you recommend?

2. How should I host this tool? I plan on sending a large volume of emails (thousands to hundreds of thousands). Would it make sense to use google-app-engine mail service to do this, or should I just host it on my own server (e.g., have my own SMTP server)?

3. I don't want my emails to be sent to spam folders, how can I ensure that the emails are received by the users?

Thanks!

Answer 1

No, you don't need your own. Based on the tags of your message, I'm going to assume you are using java and deploying your app on Google App Engine?

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/mail/