Hello Wix,
We have a project where we want to notify all website members once a new event is created. My question is: can we use Wix email service to email all our users (700) at once or is it not advised?
Do you suggest another solution (Withing Wix) or shall we use a third-party system such as SendGrid?
Hey @Quentin , how are you? Re your question, I did some research a while ago. Basically, email provider services can be divided into a) transactional emails b) bulk emails.
Transactional emails are 1-1: user fills out a form and after submit, he is sent 1 email.
Bulk email is able to send out thousands of emails in a short time, with data merging done at the provider's servers.
Wix's email service, like email.js and entry level contracts on most email providers are transactional: you do the merging and send the email, 1 by 1. You usually need a small timeout between 2 emails. Problem: if you do it from the frontend, you will definitely run up against the 14 sec timeout, if you do it from the backend, you will prob will run up against the 5 min backend timeout.
There are several email providers who offer a "burst" mode, designed for bulk mailing. One I know is mailGun.
I would not even spend any time on trying to do this with "transactional" services, bound to fail.
Hope this helps a bit, good luck.
EDIT: if you are on a strict budget, you could also use a transactional service (=1 email) with n bcc's. It will count as 1 email for your email provider and as n for the one that actually sends out the n individual emails, like Google. It all depends on how personal you want the email to be: bcc's will be "Dear Customer,", not "Dear John", "Dear Sarah", etc.