We have different desktop applications scattered through our shop to deal with different kind of emails. The volume could be about 30K emails/day. And we are thinking about having an enterprise wide solution. What articles / books/ information could I look into? It would be most likely msmq driven and could be WCF as well.
Please help...
The solution my workplace has adopted involves the various applications writing to a central database table (via various means like web services or class libraries).
We then have one Windows Service polling the table (in theory we could load-balance multiple services if load became too high) and composing and sending the mail.
This gives us good logging of all the email sent, and also allows us to have centralized email templates.
This is however just one solution, might not be the best, but it works.
This depends: are the various applications sending emails, receiving them, or both?
The most important part of an enterprise wide solution for mail is a solid smtp server. You should try Merak from IceWarp, it performs extremely well (and it's not expensive at all). You should read up on VERP (Variable Envelope Return Path) for tracking purposes. You would need to read all the RFC's regarding SMTP and MIME. And you need to understand that not all mailservers respond in the same way (different codes, messages, other clues), especially if you are interested in reasons for bounces, or if you want to be sure that your customer has received your message. There are API's out there that process bounces for you.
I've developed a solution based on MSMQ, it turn out great, and the statics are fairly good, about 98K a week, the uptime is near to 97%, what can i advice you about it? Linux sMTP server, deep drive on configuration to not be a spammer a like, this needs a person with a good experience in it.
Another important part is not only sending, is to keep the distribution list clean, services like yahoo will bring you down if you dont keep them clean(bounces). There are some commercial services to do this, but it will be very very expensive if you have a very busy service at least for us with initial avg of 50k a week.