Question
cfmail - outgoing SMTP in bulk?
Hello,
We have a few clients who are youth sports leagues and who, a few times a year, need to send emails out to 'all parents' - this can be 6000-8000 recipients a pop. We have an email manager program that generates recipient lists, works with FCKEditor to create the email, and then loops over the list and initiates a <cfmail> call for each and every recipient.
This is not usually a problem, even in moderate quantites of one or two thosuand. The problems occur when we get two leagues who both do this at the same time, or one league who sends out a big email and cuts-and-pastes from MS word where the email is 200kb of HTML. I know we could stop the latter from happening, but I'd rather find a way to (gasp) enable their bad behavior, if at all possible.
Originally, we had an offsite email provider that we used for everything. The problem was that it would require CFMAIL to authenticate for each and every email sent, adding something on the order of 5-8 seconds' delay to each email. This made sending more than a few hundred impractical. We switched to using IIS' built-in SMTP service right on the same machine as our Coldfusion server, and this has served us pretty well; we don't authenticate but we only allow connections from our local IP. We still have the same basic problem, though, even if it takes more effort to gum up the works.
My question is: does anyone know a reputable provider of outgoing, SMTP-only email service that would either not require authentication, or would cache authentication based on IP so as not to require us to re-authenticate every single time we send an email, or else some way around having to send X-thousand individual emails that won't trigger spam filters? How have you solved this problem?
Thanks very much!
SK
We have a few clients who are youth sports leagues and who, a few times a year, need to send emails out to 'all parents' - this can be 6000-8000 recipients a pop. We have an email manager program that generates recipient lists, works with FCKEditor to create the email, and then loops over the list and initiates a <cfmail> call for each and every recipient.
This is not usually a problem, even in moderate quantites of one or two thosuand. The problems occur when we get two leagues who both do this at the same time, or one league who sends out a big email and cuts-and-pastes from MS word where the email is 200kb of HTML. I know we could stop the latter from happening, but I'd rather find a way to (gasp) enable their bad behavior, if at all possible.
Originally, we had an offsite email provider that we used for everything. The problem was that it would require CFMAIL to authenticate for each and every email sent, adding something on the order of 5-8 seconds' delay to each email. This made sending more than a few hundred impractical. We switched to using IIS' built-in SMTP service right on the same machine as our Coldfusion server, and this has served us pretty well; we don't authenticate but we only allow connections from our local IP. We still have the same basic problem, though, even if it takes more effort to gum up the works.
My question is: does anyone know a reputable provider of outgoing, SMTP-only email service that would either not require authentication, or would cache authentication based on IP so as not to require us to re-authenticate every single time we send an email, or else some way around having to send X-thousand individual emails that won't trigger spam filters? How have you solved this problem?
Thanks very much!
SK
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