I am currently working on a newsletter application which needs to sent around 20K mails in a single shot. I feel, ColdFusion mail sending capacity will not be suitable for this. I don’t have any metrics with me to prove this.
I searched around in web about this, I found there are lot of complains about this kind of bulk mail sending process using built in CFMAIL. Few of them are,
Java heap size error
IOException while sending message
Mail Spool Lock
Mail Spool Timeout
We are using Adobe ColdFusion 9 standard edition.
Is anyone worked like this requirement? Did you faced any issues? How did you fixed that? Is any other alternative ways are there instead of using regular cfmail tag?
We have a system sending out nearly 500k messages about 2 to 3 times per day. CF does not have a problem with it if you have adequate resources allocated - meaning decent drives and space, adequate heap space, and (especially) a well performing SMTP relay. In our case we set up a dedicated relay server that we could fine tune carefully.
CF Mail has not had significant issues since ColdFusion 7. CF 8 and CF 9 both perform well. There is a level at which I would suggest a different system to be sure - and other requirements might mean an SaaS would serve you better - but from a per performance standpoint 20k messages is fairly small and should not be a problem for an enterprise class server.