Question : Best way to send mass e-mail (one-offs not newsletters)

Hi all,

I'm looking for the best way to send mass e-mails.  We have many clients and several different reasons for emailing lists of our clients throughout the year.  Some are one-off emails to a list that will only be sent, usually a notification of some sort that only applies to some of our clients.  Often we want to include an attachment and send from a generic address instead of an actual user like [email protected] or [email protected].

What kind of recommendations can you make for doing such?  We use Salesforce as our CRM so any integration with that would be great.  We've used MailChimp and VerticalResponse in the past, but get the feeling that this is more for newsletters and campaign type mailings.

Thanks!

Answer : Best way to send mass e-mail (one-offs not newsletters)

Single server should be fine, as long as you take precautions.   I would future-proof by getting a quality RAID controller that supports SAS-2 disks (6Gbit/sec) instead of SAS which has 3Gbit/sec throughput.   Get an enclosure with plenty of slots, so you can add additional RAID1 or RAID10 devices in future and balance the load.   Exchange 2010 is not a big CPU pig, and most of the time people are I/O bound, so I would initially get a single quad, and spend the money I save on better I/O.

I would also buy a small SSD, use it for the boot device. This will make a big difference because all of those small 4Kb I/Os that have to get done by the host O/S won't be chewing up precious IOPs that are on the exchange database devices.