Cfmail - outgoing SMTP in bulk?

Question

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

Answer 1

Azadi,
We deal with volunteer parents and thousands of them every
year - and they migrate in and out of the program as their children
do. It is impractical to try and require them to sign up for
mailing lists, or even to maintain mailing lists with the
infrastructure we have. We also have users with multiple roles, and
recipient lists that are only 10-12 people - 'all parents on team A
in division X' or 'all volunteer referees in division Y' and so on.
There are dozens and dozens of recipient lists that change up to
three times a year.
We have user addresses in a database and are willing to
entertain any solution that doesn't require our users to do
anything differently that is within our means.