I have a growing online business and a dedicated server that I use to send out the occasional newsletter. As it grows past a few thousand customers, I wonder how I can send emails faster without being penalized?
I use PHP PEAR's SMTP Mailer module and began sending my newsletters with a "sleep" of 5 seconds. I did so because I was told basically that "if I send emails too fast, my IP will be banned and my host will be pissed".
First run of newsletters sent, no ban, great.
I lowered the "sleep" count to 2 seconds, 1 second, and now half a second using usleep.
But still, I want to post faster.
The reason being is I just realized usleep is killing my CPU levels on my dedicated server and forcing my PHPBB forums into displaying the error "Sorry but the board is temporarily unavailable, please try again in a few minutes" because of a CPU overload of some kind. The WHM load manager is reading over 1.0, not good!
So... how fast is too fast?
Can I send 100 emails per second? 1,000? If not, what or who is stopping me? Is the number of emails per second an old wives tale?
I'd rather not take any risks – if you are on blacklists, getting back out of them will be a pain. There are lots of services like TinyMail/Mailchimp that Just Work™ and offload all the problems.
(If you don't like outsourcing it, I'd at least move it to a different server – no more performance penalties, and if you do happen to be blacklisted, you still have a reserve server in case you do need to send some mails out before the mail server is unlisted).