Sending out 20,000+ emails with asp.net

Question

I am writing an application that will need to send a massive amount of emails to our students who will be selected from our database (each email will be personalized to the extent that will include their name, course of study etc...so needs to be sent one at a time).

I could do this looping over an SmtpClient, but I'm afraid that with the numbers I'm trying to send, I'll ultimately run into timeout issues or my thread being killed because of lack of machine resources.

At this point I'm just looking for suggestions of a better way to handle this, or if looping over SmtpClient is an ok solution, how I should go about handling it to prevent what I posted above.

Would a web service be a better alternative?

Please advise, TIA

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to batch this out. Do not try to run ASP.NET code to create 20K emails and send them out as you are bound to runinto timeout and performance issues. Instead populate a table with recipient, subject, body and begin a batch process from a windows service. This way your code is executed in a way where lag can be managed, instead of having a web page wait for the request to return.