Best tools for testing bulk emailing in .net?

Question

Scenario is that we send out thousands of emails through SMTP server. Content is created in advance and picked up when sent.

The thing is we want to find where our bottlenecks are in production environment and where work needs to be done. Goal is to be able to send half a million emails in ten minutes*.

Should we create dummy email accounts? I've heard of being able to send to SMTP server that only keeps them locally but does that really test all bottlenecks? Has anyone got some strategic approaches to this?

*this is for an airline who wants to promote a fare deal, by law they are required to email everyone within certain time limit otherwise there are legal implications to deal. In case someone was fearing this was a spam generator.

Answer 1

Please see this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/241269/method-for-email-testing

Answer 2

An airline promoting a fare deal? Half a million emails in 10 minutes? Certainly sounds like spam to me.

In any case, if you do set up dummy accounts and host them on just a few providers, you will end up wasting the bandwidth of those providers (and maybe DOSing them).

If you set up an internal dummy server and host your own accounts, you won't be sure if your outgoing bandwidth can handle the load in production.

One way might be to set up your own external smtp server, create one or more accounts there, and dump the spam, er, promotional email there.

Update: Just wondering, why the 10-minute limit? This would certainly scale much better if you were allowed to trickle out the emails in small batches instead of saturating your pipes all at once.

Answer 3

This previous question may be of interest.