We have a website that requires to send 1000+ emails a day to all the customers who opted for the alerts. In couple of months time we are expecting to raise our customer base to
If you can't or don't want to install your own mail server, then one option is to lookup the MX records for the destination mail servers, and do the delivery directly from your application using the SmtpClient class.
Ideally, you should do this from a background thread (a Windows Service would be even better), to minimize interference with the rest of your web site.
IIRC, MX DNS lookups aren't available as a standard Framework call. However, they are pretty easy to add using p/invoke.
I suggest you to use your own mail server. Some email servers set to check sender mail server is authorized to send email. I mean sender email server must be authorised to send your domain's emails. Otherwise receipent email server drops emails.
While this question is a bit dated. I have recently undergone a search for a host, and stumbled onto JodoHost.com. They have a reseller program in which you can have a domain classified as a 'mass mailer'. You have to sign a waiver stating that you won't use it for spam, but they give you 'unlimited' emails.
You will want to verify with them that 5000+ emails won't be an issue.
Now outside of finding a host that will allow you to send this many emails (as many ISP's will prevent this number as well), you have two options.
Easy solution is not to use a website to send all these emails just use a desktop application.
No dedicated server in a cloud is needed, an smtp server installed will do. Well that and a bulk email component like: aspnetmail
There are a number of different solutions out there. If you want to send all the emails you want you will need to get a good reputation with all the Email Providers like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail. This can be quite difficult since they do everything according to IPs and getting a fixed IP in a cloud can be difficult.
You can use providers, like smartFOCUS DIGITAL, to send the emails for you and they take care of the reputation with the ESPs.