Question

I need to send a email to all my subscribers. I am currently on a shared hosting plan that offers a SQL Server 2008 database.

I really don’t want to copy all the emails into my mail client (thunderbird) nor do I want to make a program that would grab all the emails from the db and send it through smtp.net

I am looking for a free solution that I could just tell it the db path and the column of the emails and will allow me to write a subject and body and let me send it.

Answer 1

1. Configure database mail with a profile that has the from / reply-to information matching what you want your recipients to see. You can see one tutorial here:

• Setting up Database Mail for SQL Server

2. Depending on whether you want to send the same message to everyone, or personalize each one, you can use a loop to either build up chunks of addresses to BCC (you won’t necessarily want to send to all the recipients at once) or to craft the individualized body/subject for each recipient.

3. Once you have a body and recipient(s) in each iteration of the loop, you can use msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail to send each message.

EDIT adding some sample code.

Setup:

USE tempdb;
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.Emails(Email VARCHAR(320));

INSERT dbo.Emails VALUES('[e-mail]'),('[e-mail]'),('[e-mail]');

If you want to just send all the same message and assuming the list is short – batching or chunking would be a different question:

DECLARE @bcc VARCHAR(MAX) = '';

SELECT @bcc += ';' + Email FROM dbo.Emails;

SET @bcc = STUFF(@bcc,1,1,'');

SELECT @bcc;

/*
EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail
    @profile_name = 'profile name',
    @recipients = 'your address',
    @blind_copy_recipients = @bcc,
    @body = N'body',
    @subject = N'subject';
*/

— If you want to send an individual message to each recipient, use a cursor:

DECLARE @e VARCHAR(320);

DECLARE e CURSOR LOCAL STATIC FORWARD_ONLY READ_ONLY
    FOR SELECT Email FROM dbo.Emails;

OPEN e;

FETCH NEXT FROM e INTO @e;

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
    PRINT 'Sending to ' + @e;

    /*
    EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail
        @profile_name = 'profile name',
        @recipients = @e,
        @body = N'body',
        @subject = N'subject';
    */

    FETCH NEXT FROM e INTO @e;
END

CLOSE e;
DEALLOCATE e;

Cleanup:

DROP TABLE dbo.Emails;

Finally, if your list of recipients is large, I’ll suggest you seek other alternatives that are better equipped for bulk mailing.