How Fast Can I Send Emails?

There are 3 answers to this question based on 3 possible configurations.

Visit your Wysija Settings > Send with… to find out which is your current sending method.

1. Sending with your shared server: slow

The maximum emails you can send per 15 minutes to a day is limited by your host. These vary, but are ultimately low.

See our list of hosts and their sending limits.

Why do they limit so much? Hosts don’t want to risk being blacklisted because you sent some unwanted emails.

2. Sending with an SMTP server: moderate speed

A. If you manage your own SMTP, get in touch with its administrator. He will help you figure out how fast you can send.

B. For professional SMTP services, there’s no theoretical speed limit.

Read our recommendations on SMTP services.

The limit is based on how fast your site can connect to the SMTP server itself. We recommend you chose a max frequency of 500 emails per 15 minutes. This sums up to 48 000 emails in one day.

If your SMTP server can’t handle the frequency of your settings, Wysija’s email queue management will simply delay the next batch of emails. Try to avoid that. Your SMTP server won’t appreciate and the time of delivery estimate will be offset.

We recommend this sending method for deliverability reasons. Read the word of advice below.

3. Plugging PHP Mail to your SMTP server: fastest

This is only for experts!

Your PHP Mail sending method (“Your own server” in Wysija’s settings) is always plugged to an SMTP server in order to send. A performing and properly configured SMTP server, like Post Fix, can be super duper fast. Think about millions.

Now, if you’re up to a challenge, here’s what you can do. Ready? You can relay your emails from your SMTP server to Send Grid’s, Elastic Email, or other, on multiple connections. This way, you can send 10 messages per connection up to 100 connections. This totals up to 1000 messages per second. That’s like Usain Bolt being the postman.

Our recommendation: if you have an emailing administrator genius at hand, this solution is viable.

Word of advice: concentrate on delivery rate, not speed

Sending too much too fast might have adverse consequences. For example, if your newsletters causes several bounces on a single server, you might either be entirely deferred, blocked or getting caught in a spam filter. Recipient’s servers usually “throttle” (slow down delivery) when getting too many emails from the same source. Your reputation can be hurt in this process.

Focus instead on your deliverability rate:

send from a professional SMTP
if you send from your own SMTP, follow anti-spam guidelines. This requires expert knowledge.
if you’re sending commercial emails, imagine if 10% your 100 000 subscribers decide to reply or call you all at once.