6/13/2008

Don't use gmail in production

because, one day, you will have too many customers, and generate more emails than the great Google deems appropriate for your company.

550 5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded.


I would have to say that the smtp gmail service isn't reliable anyway with it's two second response times,
421 4.7.0 Temporary System Problem.  Try again later (WS).
and
550 5.7.0 Mail Sending denied.
all up in my face.

Switching to a local postfix server tonight. 5 emails/second, no errors. Much nicer.

6 comments:

Brandon Schenz said...

Yes, I recommended gmail for domains for a company I used to work for, and ran into this exact problem withing their first week. Luckily that had a static IP, and a Windows server with SMTP already installed.

I talked to their internet service provider and confirmed that they are within the terms and conditions to be able to send these emails out directly.

It is hard to believe that Google would offer such a service to business, then limit how many emails they can send. This business is mail order so they send emails confirming the orders have been received then an email to notify of shipment. They are averaging shipping between 750 and 1000 orders a day. That means the email volume just for notification emails is on average between 1500 and 2000 emails a day. Google shut them off after 500. That is pretty unreasonable in my humble opinion.

Edward Sumerfield said...

To add a counter point, it is probably unfair of us to critique a free service for limiting our usage of their resources.

So, just a cautionary tale about our SMTP service.

Anonymous said...

http://dynamite.errfree.com/posts/75-guaranteeing-email-delivery

We've used this on one of our projects, and the Err the Blog guys give it a good review in the linked article.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately free email with no outbound limits would turn gmail into a spammer's paradise. Their services are quite good for an individual user but I would be hesitant to tie a business to free services.

Anonymous said...

These 'limits' (at least the temporary service error) also happen with paid google apps accounts

lodperera said...

I wish I saw this earlier on. I'm having the same issue but we are not actually sending bulk emails. I have already migrated the whole company to gsuite. too bad for me.. :(