20.10 node mail service

using nodemailer you decide what service you use for sending your mails.

Using a gmail account for nodemailer is quite inconsistant. I setup a loop for X mails per second, and sometimes you can send 200 (4/ps) and other times you can send 10 (1/ps). And of coarse you can make a retry and queue for this, but there are probably better options than using gmail.

nodemailer itself doesn’t have limits, the mail service you use does, gmail has for example 500/day.

How to get a gmail app password

1. go to gmail
2. click on your profile
3. go to google account
4. click on security
5. scroll to “How you sign in to Google”
6. setup 2fa if not already
7. then under “App passwords”, click on “2-Step Verification”
8. scroll to “App passwords”
9. click on “App passwords.”
10. Type your app name, I’ll go with “node-mail-service-test”
11. you’ll get an popup with the password, save it.

Concepts

• Transactional email are mails sent when a user does something, for example: resetting their password.
• Bulk mails is like sending flyers in regular mail. Sending a mail to every customer telling about your new parfum or whatever. Also known as marketing mail.

There are companies that take care of this for you

nodemailer advice about bulk mail: a smoll page.

here is a github repo of using rabbitmq and nodemailer.

a list about email sending limits from differenty mail hosting. For when using nodemailer for example. But I was able to send more mails with gmail: “615” by sending 0.5 mail/sec.

services

• rapidmail has rates of 1000 mails a month for free, or 50000 mails a month for 59 euro’s
• bird either doesn’t have a free tier, or it is locked behind a company mail adress to sign up (which I don’t have)
• Mailchimp has it’s first month free, with 6000 mails a month (unless more expensive plan) (also has a 1000/m free tier)
  • not sure if it is an api.
• sendgrid has an node api. The free plan has 100 mails / day - forever.
  • staat bekend als een van de beste
• postmark has an api. a few details. free plan is 100 mails / month.
  • Every mail is delivered in 10 seconds - they say.

sending via hotmail / office365

• microsoft has a new limit: of only 3 connections at a time.
• If you are trying to reuse a transporter too fast might cause issues. Which means that if you are sending the mails too fast or the mails take longer than expected, you’ll run into problems. Like this stackoverflow comment explains.
• Suddenly had to also get an app password (even though I firstly could send with my normal password): office365 > security > set 2fa > app passwords. kinda same as the gmail equivellent.
• Bulk mail is the easiest to be sent to yourself with all users in the BBC, like this user says.
• only use 1 connection at a time, use the same transporter.
• cross domain errors exist. like this comment says.
• here is an article from Microsoft on their limits. I got rate limited after 500mails in 2 hours.

todo

• A async service that has a queue, and sends them 1 by 1.
• A log that shows the amount of failed and sent mails.
• startqueue function to start the service, if it is not already started.