Bulk mailing in ASP.NET - asp.net

We have a site running in ASP.NET 4.0 and a dedicated Windows Server 2008R2.
So after a user successfully registers to the website, we use Facebook like friend finder and give the user an option to import friends from Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! and / or Hotmail if they want that. And after they have selected the friends they want to mail, we send those friends invitations. As we cannot make the user wait until all the invitations are sent, we need another mechanism to do that. We are thinking of
Using a service like MailChimp
Using MSMQ for sending mails
Using a Windows Service to retrieve ids from a database and send them?
On our research we found out that 2 and 3 may result in the SMTP Server being blacklisted and it will also cause the server load to increase. Our questions are
Are those assumptions correct?
Is MailChimp or services like that the way to go?
Are there any better alternatives?

Related

Sending Emails out with From Address from different domain

I work for a subscription fulfillment company, where we handle the subscriptions to various magazines (renewals, invoices primarily). So we email out to the subscribers when they purchase a magazine, that we are charging them for their monthly/annually renewal or they sent us a question about their subscription and we are answering them.
As of right now, we are creating email addresses on our domain for each of our clients (the publishers), but the publishers want us to send out the emails with their domain name as the from (not ours).
I know this can be done because we purchased email blasting software and it does it without a problem (the clients put in SPF records so that it won't be marked as SPAM). The problem is that when our .Net (specifically VB.Net) application goes to send out emails with a From from a different domain, I get back that the user we authenticated to our internal SMTP server with isn't authorized to send out on behalf of the From.
I got a partial idea from Send SMTP with From address of another domain that maybe I could ask the publishers to issue us credentials to their SMTP server and have the .Net code try using their server and credentials to send out the email, but I would prefer not to go that route.
On the same note, our people use Outlook 2010 to answer most of the customer service emails, so it would be good if the solution for the .Net could also work for Outlook. If it doesn't, it doesn't, but at least the .Net one is a step in the right direction.
Now, I am a .Net developer, not an SMTP administrator (but I'm the closest to it that we have). So any instructions need to be detailed, please assume that I am ignorant in this area, so if you say go run program such and such, please state where program such and such is.

How to setup users with email: user#usersdomain.com in ASP.NET

I have a requirement which is to allow users to buy a domain through my site and then programatically set them up with email accounts at that domain, eg user1#domain.com user2#domain.com, etc.
To integrate the buying of the domain I'm planning on using a domain reseller like this.
The next step - of creating the email accounts - is where I'm floundering currently. I'm assuming I can programatically set the domain name to point where ever I need for the email pointers, but not sure how to programatically setup the email client on the other end. I don't care so much what the email client is - gmail, etc. Ideally I'd be able to brand it a bit, but it's not absolutely required.
Hoping someone has experience with this. Thanks in advance.
first you need to choose a mail server for your system. Then you get the SDK of this server and create with the provided interfaces users from your user interface.
For example, a basic free mail server is MailEnable that plesk also use for the same reason.
on this page you can get the sdk of the MailEnable mail server
http://www.mailenable.com/developers.asp
and there you can find the api to control it from your asp.net pages.
Hope this helps you to start.

Drupal: how to register a new user through a request sent by another server

I have 2 drupal websites on 2 different servers with 2 different domains.
Users only see website A and they can fill a form with their personal data.
When they submit the form, the data arrive to my email address. At this point I pass them the url of the website B.
Now, I want to automatically register them in the website B, when they fill the form on website A, instead of only sending me an email.
Is there a way to send a request to Drupal from another server with all users account fields in order to register them ?
thanks
You can accomplish this in a variety of ways. The most customizable solution would be to start with the Services module, which exposes core APIs (including user_save) as web services.
A second solution would be to user the Deploy module, which is built on top of Services, but provides some automation around pushing users (and content) between Drupal sites.
A 3rd solution would be to use Feeds and PubSubHubbbub as described here, in the section about syncronizing users.
This is non-trivial.
You can create a module that creates the account remotely by accessing the MySQL server, and have it fire off on an action by of account creation on Server A. This would require direct MySQL server access from server A to server B, and an understanding of the SQL required on that server to make a new account. This is more secure than the next idea.
Alternatively you could open a URL on Server B and create a module that accepts the user's data, say in JSON, and then parses it and creates a new user through Drupal. See URL below.
http://www.michaelphipps.com/how-create-users-programmatically-drupal-6x
Ideally you would combine the two user DBs (see the setting.php for how to share DB tables between Drupal instances.) But at this point you are probably past the ability to do this easily.
There is no simple solution to this problem, that I know of.

host .net 3.5 webservice on dynamic ips / domains

hey guys i have written a small webservice which allows users of a company (lets call it xyz) to login to xyz's website remotely via my iphone app (without ever going on xyz's official website to login)
after logging these users programatically to xyz's website, i can allow my users to do many authenticated tasks xyz offers
since xyz does not offer apis for this i was forced to hijack xyz's login cookies from my webservice to allow users to use all the authenticated features
at no point of time am i saving xyz users username or password and use https for my webservice to ensure safety n security of users
however i have got an email from xyz asking me to shut down my webservice otherwise face legal action. if i do that my users would be very unhappy to loose so many cool features of my iphone app
i wanted to know the best way to host my webservice on some offshore server which has elastic / dynamic ip addresses with completely different patters (so xyz cant block a particular range of ips or even domain names)
i have heard amazon provides elastic ips - can they be used for such scenario
or can someone help me come out with a better solution
webservice is asp.net 3.5 based
You should negotiate with them and find out what they don't like about your service.
You can then modify it to be friendlier to them.
Alternatively, you can get rid of your webservice and connect to their control panel directly from the iPhone.
Looks like you are asking for help on doing illegal things. Not a smart thing to do on something as public as this.
Best advice I can give is bite the bullet and take your service down.

Bypassing exchange accounts while sending mail through SMTP Server in ASP.NET

I develop applications using the ASP.NET framework for my academic organization. We also have an exchange server for internal accounts.
Since my organization is under the umbrella of a larger one, all our internal exchange accounts also have external parent accounts with the same names.
I'm facing an issue where automatic emails triggered using the system.net.mail classes are correctly routed to the required email addresses, but they go into exchange account's inbox.
While this is not a big problem for some users, there are a few who want the emails to go to the parent accounts so that they can view emails while working from home.
I was wondering if there is any way I can achieve this at the application layer - to instruct the SMTP server to send mails to the external accounts with the same names and ignore the local active directory accounts.
Thanks.
No, you can't. The SMTP protocol doesn't have any spec for this.
I believe you would have to setup and point to an alternate relay for this to happen.

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