Sending bulk email from a Python script

[Simon Willison]

On 2004-03-08 18:57:29 -0600, claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) said:

> In article <2004030818081575249%cs1spw at bathacuk>,
> Simon Willison  <cs1spw at bath.ac.uk> wrote:
> >On 2004-03-08 16:42:57 -0600, Steve Lamb <grey at despair.dmiyu.org> said:
> >>     Install Mailman and make the list postable only by you.  :P
> >
> >We've already looked at mailman and a number of other packages. None of 
>them fit our requirements as we need to be able to tie the list 
>administration in to our existing user authentication / admin control 
>panel, plus we want to tie the email lists to our membership databases. 
>We've got most of the other infrastructure already, we just need an 
>efficient way of sending out bulk emails to a large list of addresses.
> 			.
> Give us a notion of scope.  Does "large list" mean to you a thousand?
> Hundred thousand?  Ten million?  How often are you sending out e-mail?

Our largest list at the moment is 4,000 addresses. The business we are in 
(local online newspaper) means we are very unlikely to ever have more than 
10,000. The answer certainly relates to sendmail, but I'm interested in any 
experience other people may have with this kind of task. At the moment I'm 
looking at using smtplib and just cycling through calling smtp.send() once 
for every address but I'm not confident that that this is a particularly 
efficient method. If there's a better option I'd love to hear about it.

Cheers,

Simon