Recommend a flexible mass mailing system for this problem

Question

1200 subscribers are being emailed each day. Each user's profile may vary according to their interests be it geographic, market sector or even product type.

Each day up to 20 new reports are created by researchers and users are sent a daily email with the report prefaces of those reports they're interested in (with a link back to a website showing the full report).

[Reports are also categorised by geography, market sector and product type]

Emails are currently broadcast via an smtp server. Each user has their email contructed according to the match between their profile and the report categories.

Is there a flexible mass mailing system which can replace the smtp server? If so, what do people recommend.

We use dotNet technology. It's unlikely that the number of subscribers will every be more than 5000. I am under pressure to integrate this with the other mass-mailing systems used by the company. They are not happy with smpt. This company employs 30k worldwide. The application described above is a custom news service NOT a marketing system. They standardise on Solaris/Java/etc but are happy to keep the current technology (apart from the smtp bit).

PS: Please.

Answer 1

You're not mistaken. Not my idea to use smtp. Not my idea to provide this degree of flexibility in the design of the user profile.

This application belonged to a tiny company who were bought out by the larger one. The system originally used smpt (and still does). The mass-mailing systems I've seen [Lyris. Pure360] don't seem to construct emails per login and seem oriented to marketing (not custom news reporting).

The only way I can imagine this being done is to have a user property (a list of IDs of the reports a user will get that day) and have that user property updated just before the emailing.

There's not way I will palm off the logic (to the mass-mailer) which figures out which user gets which reports.