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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

22k e-mails per hour averages just six per second — even the stated peak of 30 per second isn’t anything to write home about. If you go strictly by the book you are writing email to disk and flushing the buffers when the smtp server receives the email for relaying, and only acking reception when that has completed - and that gets into iops, channels, spindles, and other fun considerations that are often obscured by the cloud these days. But an easy optimization for a bulk sender is to forego that and use a less resource intensive method of tracking what hasn’t sent successfully and needs to be retried. But whatever method is used I don’t think it would really get interesting until you started sending thousands per second or higher.

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I have to agree.

I built a custom email solution for a small business similar to the one presented in the article, with a bespoke newsletter creation/mailing list management/engagement reporting platform on top of it. It handles far more than 22K emails per hour, which is a trivial volume for even very modest modern hardware.

However, I do agree with the article that building a system like this can be highly cost-effective. At one point, my aforementioned client was spending nearly $75K per year to outsource this. They've been using the system I built for more than half a decade now, with the only fixed monthly costs being a few virtual private servers.

I think the main value add with the outsourced solutions is not having to deal with all the RBL issues, complaints, staying on top of the latest smtp requirements from Google etc. That does seem to be a full time job and the 75k is probably cheaper then staffing that directly. It’s not always about just the raw infrastructure costs.

I think you would be surprised at how many outsourced solutions don't deal with all the RBL issues, complaints, RFC compliance etc.

May I ask what the main purpose of the e-mailing is? Notifications for a web-app, or is it marketing outreach, some combo thereof? Thanks

i concur, sending 22k an hour isn't very interesting nor difficult. I think the highest i've tuned a system to was about 1m per hour sustained for days and this was back in 02-03 era. we definitely burned out a few parts and upset the hands in the datacenter a few times. would be a fun project to do with modern hardware, but i have no reason to send that quantity of email anymore. removing atime was probably the biggest single speed gain, along with understanding the MTA very well.

This is the hazard of putting concrete numbers in a blog post like this. Among your readers will be people with experience sending this amount of traffic every second.

So it makes it interesting that you can either buy service, which seems expensive according to his experience, or spend engineering time (salary money) to build it once and pay almost nothing to keep it online. I think a lot of us would build it just for the experience, but many shops have a habit of buying things that are not their core competency.

> or spend engineering time (salary money) to build it once and pay almost nothing to keep it online

Every time an engineer says this, somewhere a puppy dies.

Especially with an email service, keeping up with the spammers, scammers, blacklists, AV false positives, delivery failures at large companies, etc. cost far more per year than building the thing.

Operations is never free.

Then don’t read this article and write about what you think is interesting.

sums it up 100%

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