CODEWITHSUNDEEP
databaseemailscalability
Heejin
Heejin

Reputation: 4581

How email services handle the same email sent to multiple users?

I have just become curious about how email services handle the same email sent to multiple users?

For example, if Facebook sends an email to notify its update of terms of service to all the users, Gmail server will get tons of the same email from Facebook. In that case, I think it is efficient to share the contents of the email among all members who get the email because the contents of the email do not change.

Am I correct?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 101

Answers (3)

David Johnson
David Johnson

Reputation: 152

It doesn't work that way as it would take too long to analyze the message i.e. to do a crc of the body of the text in order to dedupe the contents and then it would then take a lot of effort in order to maintain the database i.e. you would have to maintain the list of the recipients and then when all of the recipients have received the message then delete the copy.

Upvotes: 0

Thilo
Thilo

Reputation: 262714

I don't know if there is some more efficient interface than SMTP between Facebook and GMail (I doubt it), so Facebook will indeed send millions of mails.

The contents will not be identical, though, because they will include your user name, links to your profile, and tracking links (to see if you read the mail and where you clicked).

If they were identical, you could use BCC, but probably not with millions of recipients.

Now, if Google wants to send millions of mails to GMail users (or if one GMail user sends a mail to another one), they can probably do that directly in their database, without any SMTP involved.

Upvotes: 2

Jarryd
Jarryd

Reputation: 1322

I'm sure it's more efficient, but it doesn't work like that. Facebook would send a separate email to every single member.

Upvotes: 0

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