Limitations on remote smtp for company email

REMOTE SMTP Question -

We are a small company that needs to send out email verification links upon account sign up. We are hosting our own server using static IP. Discountasp.net is however the domain name registrar and does serve up one page that redirects to our beta server. We also had a problem sending out emails from our server via smtp because as you may already know, hotmail and almost everyone else will reject if you don't have your own domain name / email server. So, we've programmed, via VB some code so that we useour paid email account at discountasp.net. So the question is,
"Are there any limiatations that anyone knows about, either at discountasp or as a user with experience, where limiations to using remote smtp arise?"

Finally, our inability to send to hotmail, yahoo etc., has been overcome, but to what end>?

 

Is there any cost effective way to increase the amount of emails allowed? We are a financial services website and plan on sending outmarket commentaries that dynamically update every 20 minutes. During BETA - For a single contract like Gold futures this is fine, (72 per day, per user) however, as we add symbols and move into stocks this will easy exceed 1000.

Any suggestions? Pay account, diff service level, pay via bandwidth, etc.? Thanks! We certainly don't want to break any rules, and we need stability and continuity of service without having to host our own and take over our own records, etc.

 

Your application is not going to scale well to our service. 72 emails per day per user? How many usersdo you have?What happens when you have 500 users? Or 1000? You're potentially talking about a lot of mail as you add users.

 

You are correct in that we may be sending quite a bit of mail. For now we have limited our email through your servers for sign up and email verification, where we send a hyperlink for confirms. This will certainly be within your suggested limits.

Otherwise, we are still examining what to do.

You replyindicates that we should take on our own email server and take in our own A records or however that works. Or come up with another solution. Would you agree?? And Thanks!

 

I would agree, yes. You are going to run intoproblems sending that much mail from almost any commercial host.The reliable ones, anyway.

 

Four questions:

(1) You said, 'You are going to run into problems sending that much mail from almost any commercial host.' What kinds of problems?

(2) Like other posters, my company will someday send over 1,000 e-mails per day, as generated by my software hosted on your server. Is there a way for me to continue to use my hosted programs to generate mail, but pass them off to a dedicated e-mail service somewhere else to send them? Do you have instructions for this on your site?

(3) Suppose I generate 1,500 e-mails in one day. Will you delete the last 500, or will you keep them in the queue and send them the next day?

(4) Suppose I upgrade my service at DiscountASP.NET to have a dedicated server. Will I still be throttled at 1,000?

 

PersonalNewsletter.com has exactly the same concerns that I have and the questions posed are questions that I'd like answered as well. Consider that we are satisfied with our current services and do not want to deviate from the discountasp.net familyof solutions if possible.


As discountasp.net grows aren't these questions that as businessmen you'd like to address for your users. If your infrastructure, hardware and current setup is up to it, then why not take on the task of allowing user's like myself that require an extremely large volume of emails to leverage your setup. Surely you've designed your systems to scale and you must have correctly made some of these assumptions and allowed for them in your business model.


Why not satiate this need. You are in exactly the right position to turn up the email bandwidth,and I would gladly pay for this type of service. There are of course other avenues to take but once again, these probably include taking on and runningour own DNS and and Email servers, or going elsewhere but frankly, I don't want to.

 

1) Outgoing mail limitations. You can certainly find a host that will not limit how much mail you send, but invariably you will find that they have chronicblacklisting issues, so much of your mail may never reach its target.

2) I'm afraid that we do not have any recommendations or instructions on how to do that.

3) We do not delete messages in the outgoing queue unless mail admins think the number would be problematic. I know that is not very specific, but they evaluate all the cases individually. 1500 messages does not pose a problem, and they would likely be sent out in a couple of hours despite the 1000 daily limit (1000 would go out immediately and the remainder would be throttled but sent the following hour). On the other hand, if they seefive or sixthousand (or more)messages, those are going to be deleted.

4) We do not offer dedicated servers.

It is not a question of the infrastructure being capable of handling large amounts of mail, it certainly is. But mass mail companies are specialists, and they employ a lot of people whose only job is to get and keep their servers off block lists,blackhole lists, etc. That is not where our expertise lies, and it is not an area we are interested in expanding into. You have no idea how difficult it is to deal with blocks and blacklists, and to invite that kind of trouble is not a dark road we will voluntarilygo down. We have our ways of dealing with such things, but there are inevitably disruptive, anddisruption is something we seek to avoid.


There are a lot of different areas we could expand into, but youmay have noticedthat the company philosophy is to remain focused on .NET and MS SQLhosting. When you try to be all things to all people you ultimately end up providing a wide range of mediocre - or downright awful -services (hello Go Daddy!). It takes focus and specific expertise to be a leader in a given field, and that is how we approach DiscountASP.NET. We worked hard to gain our reputation as a leader and we will not give it up easily.


Jack of all trades, master of none. That's a cliche, but it's true.

 

Well said!

With that, I am now searching for alternative solutions. In the near future Imay ask some questions of tech support to take in my own email records, when the time is right.

Thanks for you help with this topic.