First things first. We've changed the way we send the daily newsletter and all our emails, so we have a new address to whitelist.
Whitelist subscriptions@sqlservercentral.com!!
We finally setup a new and valid email box that can catch bounces and respond as a normal box. That's if you can't whitelist the whole domain, which is preferred.
If you can't, then we also send from these addresses:
- webmaster@sqlservercentral.com - General stuff for the site
- notifications@sqlservercentral.com - Forum notifications and private message notifications
A New System
We've had our own system for sending some internal notifications and low volume messages for some time. We bought a component that allowed us to generate an SMTP message and send it to a server. Using the IIS SMTP mail service, we've sent some messages from the site, like registration messages, for years.
Earlier this year we got our maintenance renewal from Lyris for their software. A thousands of dollars for yearly maintenance and looking at many thousands more for a mailing upgrade, we decided to write our own mailer.
This system uses some software from Quiksoft to generate and send lots of messages, but in a queued fashion. We essentially duplicated quite a bit of Service Broker functionality in building this system, but I think we've ended up with something that runs well.
In some future articles we'll discuss the detailed design of the high volume transactional system that we've built.