Re: IBM i SMTP email service

All good questions. Right now we are exploring options. We have some
office that send out thousands of emails in adhoc requests. Last one was
near 5,000. (We have about 5,500 students). Up until a month ago we had on
site Exchange. In December we changed to Office 365 (many advantages for
higher ed outside just email services). Discovered after that change that
O365 limits the "TO" box to 500 emails. So in the past a user could
cut/paste their entire 5,000 address list and send. Now they have to select
500 at a time and send multiple times. Process killer? No, not in my
opinion, but there is sufficient push back from these offices to find ways
to make it better. So one alternative was to use the IBM I SMTP server to
send these mass emails by letting the user who needs to do this connect and
send as many as needed. (p.s. not my favorite alternative but it is a
possibility). Another avenue we are exploring is a listserv what lets
someone import a list of emails before sending and then sending to the
list. Could be some room for error here if they load the list today with
1,000 and send their email, then next week load 2,000 without first purging
the original list. Emails could go to the wrong group. My favorite option
is we build a way for them to upload their list (csv), we clear and then
populate a database table and link that table to the listsserv, or even
just use the API calls to send the emails from the i. Right now I don't
know the complexity of the content of the emails sent which might make that
a limitation. HTML email with links and images and multiple attachments. I
don't think we could replicate the capabilities of Outlook when composing
an email.