Thanks to Loftboy for pointing out a discussion on CFmail to me, which in turn has led me to this:

http://mysecretbase.com/Slowing_Down_CFMAIL.cfm

That page contains a CFmail application that will slow down the delivery of your email messages, but in doing so significantly raises the reliability of the app.

actually, one of the main reasons that there are hang ups in cfmail is that users dont properly have code in there to weed out the bad email addresses which inturn creates a log jam.
although a pain in the azz, most ppl who have 1/2 a clue at this run at least 2-3 email checks to be sure the emails are valid.
the ones who have good strong ACCURATE email dbs can spit out emails at unreal rates

I really fail to see the usefulness of this. If you have that many emails going out that can create a potential situation with an AOL or MSN, then I would think it would take a month to send out the emails using this function, by sending out one email every x seconds, plus, if I have my mail spool setting to only run every 300 seconds or something, then it would not do anything either.

I wonder what the actual performance implication of doing an email validation to not doing one? I wonder at what point a bad email address gets rejected? Does the mail server do the check when CF tries to send, or does CF do this before trying to send the mail to the mail server. Either way, I'm sure it's just some kind of regex check. So wether you are doing this in your app, the CF server does it or the Mail Server does this, I would think the performance gain of doing it at the application level would be minimal. Just curious.

i think ur missing the point
the point is that if ur trying to send mail out and the db is full of bad emails its gunna choke & die
therefor, doing email validation is important & not just a regex check but also checking whether or not they bounce and removing them from the db if they do bounce, cause thats where it all gets messed up

Hello,

We are thinking of moving toward this system to prevent being filtered by the "too many emails" at one time filter (AOL and TDS).

We send about 1200 each week (all at once using cfmail and a list serv).

If we move to the "Throttle Down" method, won't that cause the processing page to take a long time to execute?

Regards,
Craig Hadley
Madison WI

Yes it would slow the script down. Also if you are on a shared environment this probably going to do very little. There are probably a ton of other emails going out from other users, potentially to the same domains, such as aol, msn, etc...

It's the mail server sending the mail that has the potential for being blocked, not the email address sending the mail.

Hello,

Thanks for the reply.

I was also thinking of using the "trickle" method only slightly differently.

What if we stored the emails in a database as Matt suggests and then send them out, say 50 each half hour using a scheduled task? 95% of our subscribers are based in WI and over 100 use TDS (or one of their subsidiaries) which is a major regional provider. This might not help with the aol folks, but it might help us with tds.net?

This blocking is getting to be a big issue. Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Craig

I think that's a good idea as well.

The real issue is spamming all together, until the advent of more robust email protocol standards, I'm afraid there is little that can be done from an application standpoint.

I still believe white lists are the way to go for end users. A lot of mail clients offer junk mail filtering with this type of option.

If you want to be absolutely sure that you're doing everything possible to prevent your messages from being blocked, I'd recommend sending them from a private dedicated server. That way you have a static IP address, as well as your own host name, and these account for 90% (if not more) of the features needed to insure that you are not blacklisted.

Then, if your server does have a problem, at least you can work on the problem knowing that at least you're the only one sending emails from that particular IP/host.

http://aspfusion.net/advsmtp.htm

Hello,

This sounds interesting, especially the part:

"It sends email messages using IP address of a specific website instead of using server IP address. Which eliminates chances of server IP address getting blocked for any spam complaints. (a new feature) "

Have you guys heard of this option before? And can it be installed at hostmysite.com?

Thanks,
Craig