I have an e-mail account with hostgator. I would like to build a console application (later a service application) that will check a mysql database for e-mails that need to be sent out and will process them by sending a certain number of e-mail every so many seconds. These e-mails will each have a 2-3mb pdf price sheet attached to be sent to our regular customer base. About 500 are set up to receive e-mails.
My question is: Should I connect to hostgator directly and send the
e-mails or should I use the IIS Virtual Server Relay and have it
connect to hostgator?
The only thing I can think of is if Hostgator were down the virtual relay might be a good option since it has retries. There again, I guess I could put some try/catch in the code where if it doesn’t connect to hostgator or if their is a problem it will go to the timer and wait x minutes before retrying to process e-mails.
We have found that the easiest approach is to generate the outgoing emails and drop them in the inetpub\mailroot\pickup folder and let the SMTP service handle them (you can set it up to forward the emails to the appropriate host).
This falls firmly under the category of not re-inventing the wheel: the SMTP service easily handles the situation when the connection to the mail server is down, retries, and all of the other “fun” stuff that you would otherwise have to implement in your code if you handle the SMTP sends directly.