Bulk Email System (not spam) - Build, Modify or Buy ?

should we build, modify or buy a bulk emailing system?

[harmonyjones]

We need a bulk mailing system to send out emails and newsletters to our registered users (around 10,000) that integrates well with our existing system, viz ColdFusion 4.5 SP2 on IIS5, W2K Server with SQL2000 DB.

Desirable features are :

1. Ability to send out fairly large HTML mails (abt 50 KB each) in the thousands per hour while placing minimum load on the mail server.

2. MIME-compliant, ie being able to send out both HTML and text format mails.

3. The ability to personalise some of the content of the mails generated, ie to be able to query for data from our SQL database, and create personalisation based on that.

4. Provision to define a standard template for the HTML email, and a web-based interface to enter the actual body of the email (some basic web authoring utility).

I feel that a combination of custom tags might be able to help us build this kind of system, while having to write as little code ourselves as possible.
Does anybody else have experience of building such a bulk mailing system for their site ? Can anybody recommend any custom tags or other solutions that would allow us to achieve this ?

Not sure if we should build from scratch, search for some existing code or buy a full product.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ever try one of the mailing list generators? Domo works pretty good. I run a copy locally for just newsletters.

[txbakers]

Well, this might turn into a sales pitch for various companies, but Here goes:

I use Mercur 4.01 which I adore. Simple to use. I send a list of 5500 regularly without problem.

www.atrium-software.com