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?

Have you looked into a mailing list program at all? I've been using SMTP myself, but I'm running a dedicated server so sending a lot of mail is not a problem.

Are you on shared hosting? If you have a huge list of emails to send, now might be a good time to consider going dedicated.

Google some mailing list providers, you could get a web based subscribing company I bet.

If you are sending email newsletter, better use an email service provider since you off-load much of the work to them.

If what you mean is a web app, you can use direct injection to the mail queue -- be it postfix, sendmail or qmail. But, of course, the limitation is related to your hosting TOS. They may not enable bulk email like that.

If you really have to host your own mailing list, look into Autoresponse Plus.