the best way of mass mailing on a NT box

i'd like to discuss about the best way of mass mailing on a NT box.

Last month i had to code a "monthly news" module for a community site. And we were going to send +50K mails per at oncemonth with that module.

I found out that there are two major ways to do this depending on the settings of the mail server we're using.

One solution was for the case that mail server arranges the amount of e-mails that will be sent according to the traffic. And this would let us the push all the e-mails at once to the spool. And this seems to be ok because of our responsibility of sending e-mails with special content for the each news subscriber.

We could even use a VB application, TransactSQL or a service DLL to create all e-mails at once.

The other way was to send e-mails as little groups and force mail server to send them all as soon as possible.

But this would force us to divide mail creation proccess into so many groups and thus mail sending would take too many cycles of CPU

Then we offered an option to our customer as the cheapest way to do it and used a PIII PC with 128 MB RAM running a Red Hat Linux on it and coded simple PHP + Perl scripts to handle this job.

And they accepted the cheapest way ofcourse.

But.. what if i had to do it on NT box ,what would be the most efficient way to do mass mailing.

If anyone has an idea ,i'd like to hear that.

Thank you..

I would say that this is more of an platform-specific application issue, and not a database issue.

Have you tried posting your question in Operating Systems > Windows NT/2000/XP?

i'm sorry if i wasnt open about the subject..

i'm looking for a suitable way of producing custom e-mails and sending them

i'd like to talk about it from the side of MSSql...

building the best query and setting up the most efficient job on MSSql.

if it would be a better way than using an application or a service dll

I'd like to compare it with other ways. The DB Solution.. And Database gurus would compare it more efficiently..

I'm sorry if i was wrong

Well, I think I see your point, and yes a database should be involved, but really SQL queries themselves can't send emails, or do any of the other things you would need to do. The database is of course the best place to store all your email addresses, and the information used to decide who gets what email, etc... But everything else happens at the application level, not the data abstraction level.

The extent of database involvement in this is: use whatever program you create to simply make a couple of queries to the database, and loop through those queries producing whatever output needs to be produced to send the emails.

But, that is elementary stuff. The question about how to optimize usage of the email server is something I wouldn't even know how to answer, since I spend a little time with Exchange as possible.

And, I'm not sure I understand your explanation about the choice between sending emails in groups or all at once. That is definitely not a database issue. I'm not trying to push you around, but just explaining why I think you would get better results in the Windows forum.