[ajug-members] Question for a wouldbe spammer

[Burr Sutter]

Hello AJUG'ers,

I have to build an email blaster that allows my end-users to grab a list of
their customers and send them all a common email. Some of these sets of
customers could easily hit 10,000.  
I'm wondering if anyone has any experience in this area as I have a couple
of concerns:
a) To BCC or not to BCC that is the question.  I can try to use the BCC
feature and put it through the SMTP as a single message.  Or I can
individually address (a message per recipient) 10,000 html-based messages.  
Any thoughts on either approach?  My concern with BCC is that there may be
some limit as to the number of email address (bytes) the average mail server
will handle. Plus, various spam filters at the customer site look for this
kind of behavior and prevent the messages from coming through.  I'm not in
control of which email server will be used. 

b) If I elect to use individually addressed emails then executing this bit
of logic in the web container seems potentially hazardous.  I'm thinking
I'll need to run it async and outside of the web container process. 

It should be noted that the customers have "opted-in" or subscribed to
receive these notices.   

Companies that provide this service normally charge at least $500 a month so
my customers wish to avoid using them. 

AJUG uses MailMan and I've used MajorDomo before as well.  However, my
end-users don't need discussions, just announcements and all their "lists"
are really just ways to look at their customers (all customers of a
particular type or living in Atlanta, etc).

Just looking for your thoughts.  I plan to keep this as simple as possible
since I only have a couple of weeks to build the component.