I'm busy coding a reusable e-mail service for my company. The e-mail service will be doing quite a few things via injection through the strategy pattern (such as handling e-mail send rate throttling, switching between Smtp and AmazonSES or Google AppEngine for e-mail clients when daily quotas are exceeded, send statistics tracking (mostly because it is neccessary in order to stay within quotas) to name a few).

Because e-mail sending will need to be throttled and other limitations exist (ex. max recipient quota on AmazonSES limiting recipients to 50 per send), the e-mails typically need to be broken up.

From your experience, would it be better to send bulk (multiple recipients per e-mail) or a single e-mail per recipient?

The implications of the above would be to send to a 1000 recipients, with a limit of 50 per send, you would send 20 e-mails using BCC in a newsletter scenario. When sending an e-mail per recipient, it would send 1000 e-mails. E-mail sending is asynchronous (due to inherit latency when sending, it's typically only possible to send 5 e-mails per second unless you are using multiple client asynchronously).

Edit

Just for full disclosure, this service won't be used by or sold to spammers and will as far as possible automatically comply with national and international laws.

>Closed<

Thanks for all the valuable feedback. The concerns regarding compliance towards laws, user experience (generic vs. personalized unsubscribe) and spam regulation via ISP blacklisting does make To the preferred and possibly the only choice when sending system generated e-mails to recipients.