I have a client that I want to switch to a virtual private server. I try to make his server as simple as possible, even without an email server (or at least that's a plan). The reason is that I read that email servers are complicated in setting up and using a lot of resources. I'm not sure what to do here.
He has a newsletter that he sends to nearly 75,000 people. There is currently a cron job on its shared hosting that invokes a script that sends 100 emails at a time (to be within the host). I'm curious to know if you can do the same thing, but using my Google Apps email account? Effectively log in and send an email from there? It seems I can not contact Google about this and it does not seem to be in the help section.
Is it possible? Would it be wrong to do? My client looked at many mail messages (MailChimp, etc.), but they are very expensive for what they are. Moreover, he is working now. The fact is that I am implementing everything new on VPS and therefore I am looking at options.
UPDATE: It seems that the Google option is simply not an option (I'm not surprised at all). May I ask what minimal email server can be configured on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which will allow me to continue the cron approach that I had before on a shared server that will allow sending emails? (I will still continue to use MX records for Google for the actual emails that the client will use)
UPDATE: My friend went to the Django mini-conference in London the other week, and there was a guy who runs Mixcloud. He said he uses the Google App Engine to send emails, so it is fully scalable. Github has the Google App Engine code: http://github.com/tow/appengine-mailer , and this seems to make sending emails from Django much easier (this can be used with PHP), etc. It seems like a very good option and cheap! What do you guys think?
UPDATE: I started a new question to make it more sophisticated and clear, in order to hope to help others who might have this problem: Effectively use the Google App Engine to send large numbers of emails using PHP?