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?

Related Posts

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.

Read More

It's beginning to look a lot like…

I had a call this morning discussing holiday email volumes.
1dd9lv
I think many consumers now expect the deluge of emails that start in early November. I’m not sure all of them want it, but I think they expect it. We’ll, of course, be writing more about holiday volumes, mailing issues and such through the end of the year.
What are your plans for sending all the mail? How have experiences in previous holiday seasons affected your planning for this one? Tell me how you’re approaching things.

Read More

That unsubscribe time of year

Like many people, I make purchases online. This usually means the vendor adds me to their mailing list. I normally don’t care, that mail all filters to my “commercial” folder (my own personal version of tabs) and I can browse it at my leisure.
At this time of year, though, email marketers go into a bit of overdrive and that folder fills with 20 – 30 or more emails a day. The volume is no so much of a problem, but it can get annoying to try and find mail I want in all the crud from random vendors.
In some cases, I don’t even know who the company is or why they have my address. Today’s example was a florist in Maryland. Eventually I figured out I’d purchased from them back in 2007 to send flowers to a colleague when her mother passed away. Apparently, they’re doing so badly they need every dollar they can find.
What it does mean, though, is that I unsubscribe from more mail in December than I do through the rest of the year. I don’t mind the occasional mail, even weekly is no big deal. But when that frequency drastically increases, or someone has not bothered to mail me for 5+ years, I just don’t want that mail anymore.
Dana Perino used the term ‘unsubscribe Tuesday‘

Read More