It's pretty hard to kill most mail-servers just by giving them lots of mail to send. Most reasonable systems (qmail, Ironport, Ecelerity, etc) have solid queuing mechanisms that will deal with any backlog. Just make sure they have enough free disk space and you should be able to push out your messages as fast as you can format them. In general that means using a custom injection format rather than straight SMTP (qmail-inject for qmail, ESMTP for Ironport, Ecelerity::Injector for Ecelerity, for example).

Of course, that assumes the sending server isn't running MS Exchange, or something equally pathetic. If that's the case, by all means throttle it!

Arguably harder than the actual sending is bounce processing. In order to not be blocked by ISPs you have to process bounce logs from your SMTP server and unsubscribe bad addresses. You also have to parse bounces that arrive via email to your Return-Path. Both involve tricky heuristics and very little standardization.

-sam

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