Emailing From MS SQL

Hey,

I would like to set up a job to send mail out to clients on a semi-regular basis. Is there a way to mail directly from MS SQL.

or some application which I can set to interface with MS SQL and send these mails out.

I'm currently using asp.net, however, doing it through the web is very time consuming, I would much rather use some application to generate the mails on the server as it currently takes close to 20 min to send through the web interface (and that's only to 900 members, we are looking at having at least 2000 members in a few weeks). What am I looking for is something I can call perhaps with transact sql so I can run it through an ms sql server job, however any solution you have would be fantastic.

If you don't have specific details, that's fine, I'm not even sure what apps etc to look into, even a name of some technology to use (or does MS SQL have a way of doing all of this itself?)

Thanks a lot for your help, life saver ;-)