Getting whitelisted and managing your mail server isn't easy and usually costs a lot. I think it's only something that should be optimized when you are sending millions of emails pr. month (like they are).
For everybody else, you can save a lot of time and money by going for Amazon SES, Google App Engine, SendGrid or Postmark (etc.) A lot of these services also include analytics and monitoring and will be cheaper than rolling out your own customized solution (in terms of time and money).
Even for them they would only pay around $6000-$7000 pr. month by using Amazon SES.
For everybody else, you can save a lot of time and money by going for Amazon SES, Google App Engine, SendGrid or Postmark (etc.) A lot of these services also include analytics and monitoring and will be cheaper than rolling out your own customized solution (in terms of time and money).
Even for them they would only pay around $6000-$7000 pr. month by using Amazon SES.