Since 2.9+ we’ve had solid Mail Delivery methods built into Jetpack CRM. These let you use an external email provider to send out all emails from the CRM (from invoice notifications to clients to email newsletters with the Mail Campaigns extension).
Mail delivery methods mean your CRM is truly scalable to a high level, including on the email deliverability front. There are, however, limitations to all systems, and so here we’ll take a quick look at the bottlenecks/limitations imposed upon your CRM:
Sending Limits: Jetpack CRM
Jetpack CRM itself does not have any strict email limiting. Ultimately the CRM is the ‘middleman’ who ‘asks’ the server (or mail provider) to send the message on your behalf. Technically, the only limits built into Jetpack CRM regarding mail sending are those in Mail Campaigns.
Mail Campaigns does its best to focus on deliverability at various scales. Part of it does this is to throttle how many emails are sent out per minute. The intention here is to reduce the likelihood that your server/end recipients’ mail providers think the email is spam and trash it. As Mail Campaigns develops, this restriction will likely be overcome more intelligently, but for now, it’s easy enough to set whatever throttle you’d like to apply from Mail Campaigns settings.
The only other limitation worth noting here is the quality of your server. If you are sending many emails out, you’ll want to ensure that your server has a decent processing/memory capacity to avoid generally sluggish mail sending.
Sending Limits: Mail Provider
While Jetpack CRM doesn’t stop you from sending out any amount of email, the mail provider (e.g. your WebHost webmail, Gmail, Amazon SES, Mailgun) usually has a limit (though not always publicly stated).
We recommend using a quality provider such as Amazon SES (our guide). With quality providers, the limitations are clearly stated on your account. As you can see in this screenshot, we have a quota of 50k emails per 24 hours, at a rate of 14 emails/second:
Cost of Email Sending
There are a plethora of email providers out there, from full-service mailing list managers to Gmail. In our experience, you get what you pay for, to an extent. There are expensive ways to achieve large-scale emailing that could be done more cheaply with a bit of setup. Trying to send lots of emails out of free providers (like Gmail) is usually a hassle than it’s worth in savings.
Here’s how pricing works in emails out of Jetpack CRM:
- We don’t charge per email or anything of the sort – we’re the software, and beyond a Mail Campaigns license (if you want to run mail campaigns), there is nothing to pay us for emails you send.
- You choose which email provider you use to send emails from. We’ve used Amazon SES, MailGun, Sendgrid and others in the past. We currently use SES, but there are many good services to choose from.
- Those services usually charge a fee per email, but compared to newsletter providers, the fee is tiny. For example, as I write this, the cost for our Amazon SES emails comes in at $0.10 per thousand emails sent.
Gmail OAuth Connection for Mail Delivery Method
From version 5.2.0 it’s possible to connect your Gmail account with CRM for mail delivery. We have put together a step-by-step guide to follow to set it up. You can find it on this dedicated Gmail OAuth Connection documentation page.