Why sending mail via SMTP is so long?

English Transactional
1

So I’m currently on the free tier to test out how that works and if it is the approriate tool for my website

But the thing that is annoying me is that to send 2 emails it takes like 30 seconds which is incredibly long.

I’m currently using nodemailer with the SMTP to send them, and when I was not using brevo but Gmail SMTP it took less than 5 seconds.

Any advice would be welcome :slight_smile:

2

Hi @eli-ott , thanks for posting on this community!
Is this delay always happening, or is it sometimes less, and sometimes more?
Maybe @Mohit you have some clue about it?

3

@ahudavert yeah sometimes it is less, for example when I already sent a mail before on the same page it takes less time. It is usually the first mail that I send from a specific page that takes the most time.

4

Ok I see.
@Mauricio would you have any hints about the time it should take to send an email with the nodemailer with SMTP?

5

We have the same issue of slowness. We have a truly short user verification message, just a few K bytes.

  1. It took 8 seconds for the SMTP to accept the message and get the ack back.
  2. It took an additional 9 seconds for it to forward to my Gmail account.

This kind of thing should not take this long! Are SMTP endpoint instances cold started or something? With a bit of overhead on our own our users are waiting close to 30 seconds for the email to arrive. We will evaluate the speed differences with Sendgrid over the same code and when that’s done, I will update that here.

6

Using Brevo’s free tier can sometimes cause delays due to rate limits on the SMTP server. To improve speed, consider:

  1. Upgrading to a paid plan: This may prioritize your emails.
  2. Switching to their API: Brevo’s API is often faster than SMTP.
  3. Batching emails: If you’re sending multiple emails, batch them to reduce overhead.

Gmail SMTP might be faster due to fewer restrictions, but Brevo’s advanced features could outweigh the delay for production use.