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Sergey Khomushin for EmailJS

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What is the fastest email service?

Hi, we are often asked which service to choose. Which is the fastest? Why is email provider X so slow? We will try to answer these questions in this article.

EmailJS is an abstract high-level layer for a dozen different email providers that allow users to use a single API to send emails directly from code. It can be called the "intermediary" between the client application and the email provider. This service is already used by thousands of customers, and in terms of this comparison, EmailJS is unique.

Disclaimer

  1. The statistic is carried out only for officially added providers. All custom ones will be in "Others".
  2. To connect to providers, either API or SMTP is used. The SMTP protocol is much slower by definition.
  3. The statistic includes personal and transactional services. Transactional services are built for high asynchronous workloads and are usually faster.
  4. The statistic is based on a sample of 30,000 unique users in November 2022.
  5. The email provider is an email service and vice versa.

Top Most Selected

The email provider is most often chosen by customers.

No special discoveries here, with Gmail using over 80%, followed by Outlook with just over 4%. The Mandrill is the least used, which is obvious since the service is very expensive.

Top Most Called

Shows the amount of total traffic for each email service.

The first and second places remained unchanged. However, there are some very noticeable changes in this statistic. The outsider in the previous comparison - Mandrill - has a high traffic.

Top Request Time

And here is the most expected! This comparison will be divided into two groups: personal and transactional, to make the comparison fairer. The less time the request takes, the better.

Personal Services

The Gmail service uses an API, which gives it a huge advantage over other services. Zoho has good performance as the SMTP provider. But the average request processing time for Outlook is three times slower than other participants!

Transactional Services

All comparison participants show low request processing time. Postmark is a bit slower, but Mailjet is the worst on the list.

Summary

I hope you were as interested in the results as we were. And it was also beneficial for us. What conclusions can we draw?

  1. The AOL service has minimal traffic, and customers don't actually use it. It have to be replaced. Any ideas on which one? Maybe ProtonMail?
  2. The Outlook provider is popular with EmailJS clients but has a slow request processing speed. Microsoft has recently released an API for the email service, and we may look into how to use it.
  3. We need to figure out why Mailjet is so slow compared to other providers.

Thanks for reading this article, I'll be happy to read any suggestions for improving future comparisons in the comments.

Top comments (1)

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Sergey Khomushin

I thought it would be an interesting idea to make the charts interactive, but sometimes they don't load. If this happens to you, please reload the page.