Using Postfix to Speed Up Email Delivery
Sending emails through SMTP works just fine for most people in most situations, but there are times when you may wish you could send your emails even faster than the speed you are currently achieving.
Why use Postfix?
Postfix is a common, open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) that can add some features to your outgoing email setup, to increase sending speed and reliability. Here are a few reasons why you might wish to consider using Postfix. Postfix would act as an intermediary between your app, and SMTP2GO.
- Postfix can connect to SMTP2GO with multiple concurrent (simultaneous) SMTP connections. When sending emails through your SMTP2GO account, you can have up to 40 concurrent SMTP connections.
- Postfix supports Pipelining, which isn't supported by many SMTP libraries. SMTP is considered to be a chatty protocol, and Pipelining can greatly improve speed.
- Postfix can send multiple emails on each SMTP connection. More basic emailing software will only be capable of sending one email per SMTP connection. i.e. Connect > Send 1 Email > Disconnect > Connect Send 1 Email > Disconnect. This adds a lot of unnecessary overhead and can greatly reduce sending speed. SMTP2GO allow up to 2,500 emails to be sent on each SMTP connection.
- Using Postfix means that queuing and retries are possible if your server experiences connectivity issues. If your app is unable to contact SMTP2GO for any reason, it is still likely to be able to contact a local installation of Postfix, where it can deliver its emails. Postfix can then take control of the email delivery to SMTP2GO. If there are ever any connectivity issues, Postfix can queue and retry the emails, meaning that your app doesn't need to deal with retry logic or queuing.
Postfix can be installed with the assistance of our Postfix setup guide.
Other MTA software can also be used in a similar way. They are listed in the 'Mail Servers' section on the main Setup Guide page.