General Discussion

Building a email communication system

High Scalability

Feb 19, 2008 — 1 min read

hi,
the website i work for is looking to build a email system that can handle a fair few emails (up to a hundred thousand a day).

These comprise emails like registration emails, newsletters, lots of user triggered emails and overnight emails.

At present we queue them in SQL and feed them into an smtp server on one of our web servers when the queue drops below a certain level.

this has caused our mail system to crash as well as hammer our DB server (shared!!!).

We have got an architecture of what we want to build but thought there might be something we could buy off the shelf that allowed us to keep templated emails, lists of recipients, schedule sends etc and report on it. We can't find anything

What do big websites like amazon etc use or people a little smaller but who still send loads of mail (flickr, ebuyer, or other ecommerce sites)

Cheers

tarqs

Capturing A Billion Emo(j)i-ons

This blog post was written by Dedeepya Bonthu. This is a repost from her Medium article, approved by the author. In stadiums, sports fans love to express themselves by cheering for their favorite teams, holding up placards and team logos. Emoji’s allow fans at home to rapidly express themselves,

Brief History of Scaling Uber

This blog post was written by Josh Clemm, Senior Director of Engineering at Uber Eats. This is a repost from his LinkedIn article, approved by the author. On a cold evening in Paris in 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn't get a cab. That's when

Behind AWS S3’s Massive Scale

This is a guest article by Stanislav Kozlovski, an Apache Kafka Committer. If you would like to connect with Stanislav, you can do so on Twitter and LinkedIn. AWS S3 is a service every engineer is familiar with. It’s the service that popularized the notion of cold-storage to the

The Swedbank Outage shows that Change Controls don't work

This week I’ve been reading through the recent judgment from the Swedish FSA on the Swedbank outage. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, Swedbank had a major outage in April 2022 that was caused by an unapproved change to their IT systems. It temporarily left nearly a million

Read more

Capturing A Billion Emo(j)i-ons

Brief History of Scaling Uber

Behind AWS S3’s Massive Scale

The Swedbank Outage shows that Change Controls don't work