Gmail vs own mail server for large trafic websites

Question

A web application needs to send a lot of mail: notifications, news, confirmations etc

On a small website I use Gmail to send my e-mails to users.

But what email system do the big sites use ? (pros vs cons)

Thank you

Answer 1

You can use your own server by just using your languages' API for sendmail, or you can use one of the various hosted email services designed for web applications (SendGrid, Postmark, etc.).

As far as the disadvantages of using gmail, all your emails will have "sent via gmail.com" in their headers, which doesn't convey much confidence that it's actually from your website. If you set up your own mail server you can use SPF & DKIM to prove that the email is actually from your website. Most hosted services also (I believe) allow this. This way your email is less likely to be marked as spam or possibly untrusted by the user or receiving mail server.

As others stated gmail can also rate limit your email sending which is a huge disadvantage when your emails don't get to your users quickly or possibly not at all.

Answer 2

Gmail will block you if you send too many emails from Gmail to user (You will get caught by spam detection)

Its better to host your own email server, because it looks professional when you send email to your users. Few things to take care when hosting your own email servers.

1. You have get whitelisted on Yahoo mail service.
2. Setup domain keys and spf records properly and get them tested.
3. May need to deal with several spam checkers and get into their good books by not spamming.
4. Setup reverse DNS for all the machines from which you are sending mails.
5. Also check that your IPs are not in any blacklist.

You can blacklist at http://rbls.org/

or you can use hosted services like one provided by Amazon Aws - Simple Email Service