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I find these absurdly limited mail services strange. The one time I had to craft some "extra" email, was sending out surveys to an opt-in group for an EU project. There were some 10 000 recipients, and we had to send each a different email, in order to link responders with surveys (ie: a template email with description and an unique url of the form https://example.com/survey/123xyz).

Generating the emails in a naive loop and sending them via python took an insignificant amount of time - but in the end we worked out doing batches of 2000 at a time was easy enough - and with some help from the college that ran the email service (via exim) it all worked out (if you're going to send 10k mails in a day, it's nice to give your postmaster a heads up).

Hosting the mail server ourselves (using eg exim or postfix) would've worked too. Not sure about any of the spam-as-a-http-api services - even with custom domains they tend to have poor reputation, and they have these silly limits that mean they're not only not "auto scaling" - they're very low performance.



The problem is spam. The big providers providing hosted emails do a lot of work to make sure the emails people send with them actually end up at the recipients inbox and not in spam quarantine - but that doesn't work if the provider is then used by spammers. So the limits are set to discourage spammers while making most use-cases for email still possible.

If one were to ask me what to do, I'd say emails should cost 0.1 cent each, to be paid to the recipient...




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