Calculating required bandwidth for email delivery

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Izi

Izi

Izi

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I am thinking of moving our current newsletter delivery service to our office on a dedicated 2.5meg line.

The system sends around 2-3 million HTML and text emails a month. How can I approximate if 2.5meg will be enough bandwidth? I suppose it depends on the size of the emails its sending, but if someone could help best guess that would be great.

Thanks.
 
You need to know the average size of the emails otherwise you might as well be asking how long is a piece of string, other use on the line will also play a major factor so if it isn't dedicated to this email service you need to know how much spare bandwidth you currently have available.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
It also depends whether you need them all to be delivered within a certain time frame.
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This will be a factor - it will be interesting to know what the maximum amount of emails can be sent persecond with the available bandwidth.

I have just checked the size of a couple of HTML emails we send. They are 50kb each. I dont think they will get much bigger than that.
 
I think you will be able to send about 24000 emails per hour on that bandwidth assuming a size of 50k. Don't forget there will be additional bandwidth overhead for every email also.

So, really.. depends how often you send them.. if you send consistently over the entire month... it's not so bad. If you try to send them all on one day, it's not going to work.

Also as other people have mentioned, there may be other usage on the line.

Edit: Actually, thinking about it, 24k is probably on the high side. I'd go for slightly less actually.. 20-21k especially with the overhead.
 
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Ok thanks, I had calculated 6 emails per second... which is 21600/hour.

So in short, it would work because the load is spread over the space of a month (not all in one go) - I should also tell our clients to keep HTML file size as low as possible!

Thanks for your input.
 
Yes but don't forget it's on the assumption of a completely unused line. If you have users in the office trying to pull files through that connection it will basically become unusable.

Also I know you say is a 2.5mb line but is it a leased circuit with equal up/down speeds? I want to make sure you are not using ADSL or something as clearly this will not work...

Also make sure your service provider doesn't place any bandwidth limits on your usage. You will be pushing out ~140+ gb of data and you don't want to get charged for it.

Another option, which can work out fairly cheap, is an unlimited bandwith VPS. You could do the same thing off here without really affecting bandwidth into/out of your office.
 
It would be a dedicated second line, so office users wouldnt be pulling data from it.

Problem with VPS - it needs to be pretty powerful. The scripts used to send out mail are intensive (currently our dedicated 2.5GHz core 2 , 2gb ram and scsii HDD is suffering). VPS servers tend to be limited to 2gb ram and such, or maybe I havnt looked in the right places?
 
Izi said:
It would be a dedicated second line, so office users wouldnt be pulling data from it.

Problem with VPS - it needs to be pretty powerful. The scripts used to send out mail are intensive (currently our dedicated 2.5GHz core 2 , 2gb ram and scsii HDD is suffering). VPS servers tend to be limited to 2gb ram and such, or maybe I havnt looked in the right places?
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Mm. You may be right. However, I know how much these lines can cost. Not sure what you are paying but some prices I've heard I could co-locate a brand new server for less.

Not saying it's the way forward, but it may just be worth a look.
 
Other than the bandwidth, take into account that your emails might be more likely to be marked as spam due to things such as no reverse dns record, dynamic ip, netblock marked as isp, etc.
 
accod said:
Other than the bandwidth, take into account that your emails might be more likely to be marked as spam due to things such as no reverse dns record, dynamic ip, netblock marked as isp, etc.
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If their circuit is coming from any half decent ISP, reverse-DNS won't be a problem and they'll have a static IP block.
 
Biffa said:
One of the few things I always advocated outsourcing was mailing lists
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if you want, outsource them to me ;)

I decided against the inhouse server. Got a dedicated linux server doing the job.

Thanks for all the advice tho.
 
Still worth checking the various rbl's to see if your IP is listed. We don't use Amazon EC for this very reason (and the fact you can't have custom rdns records).
 
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