I have recently started to mail my list. Just sent out my first email. I have written a small app to personalise and then send an email to each subscriber. My issue is with using an SMTP server. Being completely new to this I started off using my hosting providers SMTP server. I quickly found out that the limit the number of emails per hour I can send out, suffice to say I can send only 1 email every 18 seconds. I then decided to set a an SMTP server on my desktop to send out the email via my ISP. This works much faster and am pleased with the results. I was later told that many mail servers block IP addresses of ISP's. This would mean many of my emails not getting through. Has anyone else had experience of sending out emails to their list and how do they resolve the issues?
I send emails using php's mail() command, i.e. server's mail transfer agent (MTA) which should be sendmail or exim. I have configured a script to run via cronjob and send only 50 emails / 10 mins. This way no one can complain because that's a very reasonable number of emails and it doesn't overloads the server in any way. Another thing you can do is to set a non-functional from email so that bounces aren't stored and rather ignored.