[LRUG] Outsourcing Bulk Emailing

[Christian Batchelor]

Hi all,

I have a client in the UK who is emailing out 17,000 newsletters a day. We are using rails to manage the subscriber list and a delayed job to send. We are hosting on a small box at Brightbox and everything is working fine, but as the subscriber list grows it takes longer and longer to send, so my client wants to outsource the sending. This may also allow us to gather more statistics. Mailchimp looks good to me, but they are based in the US.

My client says that because of data protection legislation in the UK we have to use a UK provider. Has anyone come across this limitation? 
If you have been forced to UK providers, who are you using and how easy is to integrate with them using Rails?

They are suggesting silverpop.com which looks terribly corporate to me.

Thanks,

Christian Batchelor
Batchelor Associates Limited