Gmail vs own mail server for large trafic websites

Question

A web application needs to send a lot of mail: notifications, news, confirmations etc

On a small website I use Gmail to send my e-mails to users.

But what email system do the big sites use ? (pros vs cons)

Thank you

Answer 1

You can use your own server by just using your languages' API for sendmail, or you can use one of the various hosted email services designed for web applications (SendGrid, Postmark, etc.).

As far as the disadvantages of using gmail, all your emails will have "sent via gmail.com" in their headers, which doesn't convey much confidence that it's actually from your website. If you set up your own mail server you can use SPF & DKIM to prove that the email is actually from your website. Most hosted services also (I believe) allow this. This way your email is less likely to be marked as spam or possibly untrusted by the user or receiving mail server.

As others stated gmail can also rate limit your email sending which is a huge disadvantage when your emails don't get to your users quickly or possibly not at all.

Answer 2

I expect that most large sites run there own mail servers.

Using gmail is a pretty bad idea, I expect that they will shut down the account if your sending a inhuman volume of mail.

Amazons Simple Email Service sounds interesting, but I haven't hand much time to study it.

Answer 3

Gmail will block you if you send too many emails from Gmail to user (You will get caught by spam detection)

Its better to host your own email server, because it looks professional when you send email to your users. Few things to take care when hosting your own email servers.

1. You have get whitelisted on Yahoo mail service.
2. Setup domain keys and spf records properly and get them tested.
3. May need to deal with several spam checkers and get into their good books by not spamming.
4. Setup reverse DNS for all the machines from which you are sending mails.
5. Also check that your IPs are not in any blacklist.

You can blacklist at http://rbls.org/

or you can use hosted services like one provided by Amazon Aws - Simple Email Service

Answer 4

Big sites either spend the time and money setting up email systems (mail servers, SPF records, making sure they aren't on spam lists or blacklists, testing) or they pay to relay their mail through a 3rd party provider.

Sending mass amounts of email reliably is very difficult. I recommend paying for a relay service like AuthSMTP if you don't have the expertise or time.