4 beelion emails

Sendgrid announced their volumes for Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

To provide a clearer understanding of our scalable systems, on Black Friday 2019 we processed 4.1 billion emails and this Cyber Monday we processed 4.2 billion emails (46% more than 2018) and processed up to 315 million emails/hour (burst rate) into inboxes all around the world! To give you a better understanding of this scale, you can get to the moon and back 4 times in fewer yards than the number of emails we sent on Black Friday.

That’s more than double the volume they sent in 2017.

I expect other large senders did similar volumes, which makes the total amount of email over the last week mind blowingly huuuugee.

How much mail did you send?

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Successful sends on Black Friday

Last year a number of ISPs mentioned the Black Friday email volume was congesting their systems and causing delays. While anecdotally it seems that volume is up over last year I also haven’t heard any ISPs talking about congestion. Likewise, most of the delivery folks I’ve spoken too today and over the weekend are saying there were no major problems.

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Cyber Monday volumes

Wow! Congrats to all the senders out there for sending So Much Volume that mail servers are full. I’ve even seen reports that STARTTLS connections are taking multiple seconds to establish at Gmail. The volume of mail that it takes to make Google slow down is impressive.

Of course, Gmail isn’t the only system exhibiting slow downs.  Other major consumer webmail providers are also showing signs their servers are under heavy load. I’m seeing reports about both AOL and Microsoft accepting mail slowly. Oddly enough, I’ve not seen anything about Yahoo having issues. Maybe folks just never use yahoo.com addresses any more.
There may not be a fix for this. It is very possible receiving systems just do not have the capacity to handle the volume of mail folks want to send today. If senders have, collectively, decided to send more mail than max capacity there isn’t much that can be done. Maybe some very forward thinking ISPs have spare servers they can deploy, but it’s unlikely.
No major advice here, just a warning that receivers may not be able to access all the mail that’s currently being shoved at them. Nothing to do except retry, and perhaps hold off some “less urgent” sends until after normal business hours. Those of you who are sending Cyber Monday sales emails may just have to extend them to Tuesday in some cases.
EDIT: After I posted this, I saw problems with Yahoo (mail accepted but not making it to the inbox) and Earthlink as well.

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Is volume a problem?

Volume in an of itself is not a problem. Companies sending mail people want can send multiple emails a day to every user. The volume isn’t a problem because the mail is wanted.
Many senders are confused and think volume is a filtering criteria. It’s not. Send all you want; just send it to people who actually want the mail.
A lot of companies in their growth phase find they do have delivery problems as their volume ramps up. But the problem isn’t the volume, the problem is that mail programs don’t scale. Companies mailing lower volumes can get away with sloppier practices. One because the chances of hitting bad addresses increases with the number of addresses you have. But the other is that filters do take volume into account. It’s not that the volume directly causes the filters to trigger, but volume causes the filters to look harder at mail. If the reputation and metrics are good, the mail is fine and hits the inbox. If they are poor, then mail hits the bulk folder or is filtered.
Overall, volume isn’t a problem, but increasing volume can expose fundamental problems in a mail program that result in delivery issues.
 

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