Sending a large email mailout through Gmail or maybe even Google App Engine?

Question

I have a client that I'm wanting to move to a virtual private server. I'm trying to keep his server as simple as possible, not even having an email server on there (or at least that is the plan). The reason being I've read that email servers are complex to setup and take up alot of resources. I'm not sure what to do here.

He has a newsletter that he sends out to almost 75,000 people. Currently on his shared hosting there is a cron job that calls a script that sends out a 100 emails at a time (to keep within the limits of the host). I'm curious to know if the same thing is possible to do but with using his his Google Apps email account? Effectively logging in and sending the email from there? I can't seem to contact Google about this and it doesn't seem to be in their help section.

Is it possible? Would it be wrong to do? My client has looked at many of the mail out things out there (MailChimp, etc) but they are very expensive for what they are. Especially as what he has now does work. Thing is, I'm implementing the whole thing new on a VPS and so am looking at options.

UPDATE: It seems that the Google option just isn't an option (I'm not surprised by this at all). May I ask which minimal email server could be set up on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which would allow me to continue the cron approach I had before on the shared server that will allow sending the emails out? (I will still continue to use MX records to Google for the actual emails the client will be using)

UPDATE: A friend of mine went to a mini Django convension in London the other week and there was guy who runs Mixcloud. He said he uses Google App Engine to send emails, so it's totally scalable. There is Google App Engine code up on Github here: http://github.com/tow/appengine-mailer and this seems to make sending email very easy from Django, from a command-line (so could use with PHP) etc. Looks like a very good option and cheap too! What do you guys reckon?

UPDATE: I've started a new question to make it more refined and clear to hopefully help others who maybe having this problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3424625/effectively-using-google-app-engine-to-send-lots-of-emails-using-php

Answer 1

There is a limit of how many emails can be sent per day through the google apps accounts. The limit is waaay below 75k I think it is 2k per mailbox if he has the premier account.

Two options here. Sign up with a company that does this for him: Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, ...etc. Or install an SMTP server and have it go out how it did before. The performance hit the server will depend on what mail server you choose and how much load is being placed on it.

UPDATE: I primarily work with windows servers so my experience is there (setting up secure SMTP in windows is pretty easy). Googled around and found this page on Ubuntu's site. It has a bunch of options for doing this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MailServer . From that page you should only need the Mail Transfer Agent and possibly the Mailing Lists components. Also make sure to set up your SPF records correctly and identify this server's IP as an outgoing only server. It can also help to set up the server with an MX record with a priority higher than your other MX records. If google goes down incomming mail will try to go to your VPS but as long as you don't set it up to receive mail, just send it, it will bounce the request. Which would happen anyway if your google mail servers go down so nothing lost.

Lastly you can try to register your server's IP with yahoo as a bulk mailer.

UPDATE2: Also make sure to have the "FROM" address in the newsletter be a valid email address from a valid domain. This will help immensely with deliverability.

UPDATE3: Can you get a static IP with a APP Engine Account? If you can't get an IP (preferrably dedicated) assigned to you then your deliverability will be horrible and you will get blacklisted. IF you can get a static IP assigned to your App Engine account you can set it up in your SPF records and that solution should work.

Answer 2

I did this a while ago for a commercial website. To describe it as an utter ball-ache would be an understatement. The amount of man-hours we sent working with our mails, enabling the various headers to avoid it being flagged as spam, to ensure that it looked to ISPs as valid mail etc was far greater than anyone envisaged at the start of the project. Then there are issues with mail throttling and throughput - at one point we were sending a weekly mailout that took 8 days to go through the entire mailing list.....with obvious results.

Anyways, upshot is, outsource it - there are many companies out there who have already solved this problem for you - granted you have to pay for them, but its cheaper in the long run.