Processing large numbers of emails from an asp.net site

Question

The web site I am developing will be sending tens of thousands of emails daily (and that number will be growing) - registration, notifications, alerts, etc. I will have a dedicated server box that will be actually generating and sending emails by request from the asp.net application (asp.net app calls a WCF method on the email box and provides various parameters for an email). Now, I am trying to figure out what's the best way of queueing those email jobs on the email server. The call from asp.net app has to be async so that asp.net app doesn't wait for email server to create and send actual email. Originally I was just creating a worker thread for each email job request but number of emails is going to be really high and I'm not sure if creating hundreds of simultaneous threads is a good idea performance wise. My next thought is to use MSMQ but I'm not sure about its performance and scalability.

Any ideas/production examples?

Thanks!

Answer 1

At a previous job, we had to queue messages for delivery, much like you are explaining. We decided to create a database record that represented each message. At message creation time, we created the mail message in .NET and then saved it into the database. A separate process (Windows service built in .NET) would periodically check to see if there were messages to be sent (delivery date was in the past and status was unsent). It would then re-create the mail message from the information it received from the stored procedure and sent the message along its merry way.

The procedure that returned the messages ready for sending also performed throttling logic based on the day and time of the call (we allowed more of our bandwidth to be used at night and the weekends than during the day).

We also had need for tracking bouncebacks, message opens, and click-throughs which meant having a database record that represented the email was necessary so we could relate events (bounce, open, click) with individual emails and recipients.