I am working on a bulk email class for a project and am using Amazon's SES smtp via phpmailer. I am trying to figure out a way to test sending multiple emails without getting blacklisted, spam blocked or blocked by the host. I would ideally like to test anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 separate sendings. Ideally I would send test submissions to dummy addresses.
I know there are services such as http://tempinbox.com/ or http://www.fakeinbox.com/
But what I would like is a reliable trusted service for testing bulk mailings without using my own personal email addresses.
Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, could you please point me in the right direction. Or let me know if this questions is better posted elsewhere. Thanks in advance.
Regards
If it was me I would setup a new domain (or use an existing one), and setup a catch-all account. That way you can send emails to test1@mydomain.com, test2@mydomain.com, test3@mydomain.com etc and you don't have to actually setup all those email accounts.
I actually do this with one of the domains I own, but more in the order of 200-300 separate accounts, not 40000.
All the emails will be directed into a single mailbox using this method.
Most likely, you are going to have to throttle the outgoing pace to 5/second if I remember correctly for AWS-SES (or AWS will do it for you and not gracefully).
I am sure there are many of companies providing such services. The principle is, that your mail queue is going to the service company's main server, from where it is then distributed across many mail servers that company has in their cloud and from there it is being physically sent. That ensures your emails are delivered and servers that sent them are not blacklisted, because of the distribution. Unfortunately I do not have links, but sure uncle google will have some answers. Hope this helps a bit. Cheers.
Use a gmail address and the plus (+) sign after your email address with an extra identifier. For example, if your gmail account is
spamtester@gmail.com
send your test emails to
spamtester+1@gmail.com
spamtester+2@gmail.com
spamtester+3@gmail.com
...etc
They'll probably all end up in your spam folder, but you can whitelist them or just look in Spam to see them.
Reference: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html