Sending 10 different emails to random 30000 subscribers every day

Question

I have a following conundrum. I'm building a site in which a user subscribes category/categories and then receieves emails every day from a random category.

Site need to operate properly with around 30k users.

So, basically there will be 9 categories (9 different emails) send daily to around 3333 users each (30k / 9).

Question is, what is the best way to send those emails. I looked at AWS SES, but sending it via SMPT is too slow. Mailchimp, requires subscription lists (and that would produce 9 new subscription list per day to send 9 different email, or am I missing something?).

Any idead would be greatly appreciated!

Oh, it has to be done using PHP (site is using Laravel).

Answer 1

If you are sending emails in bulk, you are best off with a bulk marketing ESP like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. If you are sending mostly individual emails scheduled as different times of the day (think shopping cart, email receipts etc triggered by user actions), then a transactional service like Mailchimp's Mandrill or Sendgrid is better.

As you are sending several bulk emails, the first option is better. In the ESP (Mailchimp), you should create one big list and use segments to divide your list into the 9 groups. This way, if a subscriber changes preferences, you don't have to remove and add between lists. You just trigger the email group subscriptions off of a custom field when they subscribe.

Just make sure your list is clean though. ESP's will boot you real quick is you try and spam or send to a bunch of bouncing addresses as it affects their deliverability overall.

Answer 2

No matter of what you do, sending e-mails is slow. You may make it appear fast, but it isn't. So I would use an external mailer, like Mandrill, Mailgun or Postmark (Laravel supports them all in 4.2) and use Laravel queues to send my mail:

Mail::queue(...);

To process my queues I curently use Beanstalkd and Supervisord, but IronMQ is a a very nice service if you don't want to boot up your own queue server.

A cheap alternative (to Mailchimp) for sending newsletters is Sendy, it also uses Amazon SES, so it is way faster than you sending directly via SES.