I've searched through the history here and found a few topics regarding sending bulk e-mail, but most are a year or two old and/or didn't come to much of a conclusion.

To send out several hundred thousand e-mails (absolutely NOT spam), it seems that even with a clean IP, correct SFP record (possibly with DKIM), and RDNS correctly configured there's a high likelyhood of it getting marked as spam by a number of providers.

I'd be very happy to use a service like amazon or google, but all the ones I've looked at have rate limits in the 1000's per day, which puts me at half a year before all the mails are sent Amazon says you can contact them to request higher rates, I'll investigate this further but in the meantime...

Is there a good service with a reasonably higher rate limit that anyone would recommend, and/or are there specific steps for sending e-mail from a Linode beyond what I've outlined above that would avoid most spam filters? Thanks for your input!

Cheers,
Mike

I suppose you're talking about Amazon's cloud servers? Well, they're not meant for e-mail, period.

Amazon's flagship e-mail product is the Simple Email Service (SES), which is priced at $0.10 per 1,000 messages, plus the usual bandwidth fees (negligible compared to the per-1,000-message sending fee, unless you send large attachments).

There are also bulk e-mail sending services such as Mailchimp and Postmark. I haven't personally used either of them, and they're quite a bit more expensive than Amazon, but they also come with many additional features such as customized handling of bounce messages.

Services that specialize in bulk e-mail sending are much less likely than a private server to be blocked by major ESPs.