E-mail has as many unknowns as Google does. email can be great or good or terrible depending on how you set it up just like a PPC campaign. It is not an easy avenue to go but a lot of people do make it work.
There are a lot of companies that can help you push out your email blasts, they all charge on a CPM basis and provide a wide array of services. You can of course build you own push system and software and get your own IP's (definately more expensive but the method of choice for big mailers) Companies you can contact are:
Skylist
Quardamail
cheeta
bigfoot
topica (i think they still provide that service)
and many others just search or ask.
The most important thing with email is deliverability and deliverability will be increased through doing email in the cleanest manner possible. The route of many is to get whitelisted with all the major ESP's AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Etc Also many companies are now being certified through Habeus which certifies email marketers and is highly trusted by the ESP's
You also want to make sure that everything you use to mail is clean, meaning the IP's werent used for spamming in the past, the list is opt in, all points of CAN SPAM are followed and also you want to mail sites that are not associated with spam as well. If you promote abc.com and abc.com has had a lot of spam sent out advertising the site it can hurt your deliverabilty and your email will be guilty by association.
I have a good amount of sending email knowledge if you need other information let me know