Calculating required bandwidth for email delivery

[Izi]

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.

 

[Izi]

It also depends whether you need them all to be delivered within a certain time frame.

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.

 

[Izi]

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.

 

[Izi]

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]

One of the few things I always advocated outsourcing was mailing lists

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.