Rate Limit Changes

One of the most important things to ensure the best delivery rates is how we handle rate limiting of the messages. With the introduction of API v2, we have made some changes to how we handle rate limiting.

What’s changing?

Our old rate limits were based on the number of messages you send in a given hour. This was a good way to ensure that you don’t abuse the API.

However, this introduced few problems:

• It did not prevent from sending too many messages at once.
• This added an extra overhead to the sending process as the rate limiting was based hourly. Resulting in spikes at the start of the hour as customers would send all their messages at once.
• Most integrations does not support hourly rate limiting.
• Endless delaying of messages if you exceed the rate limit.

To solve this, we have introduced a new rate limit system for the API v2. This is based on the number of messages you send in a given second and a 24-hour period. This means that you can send as many messages as you want, as long as you don’t exceed the rate limit.

Default rate limit

The default rate limit is 2 messages per second. Which theoretically means that you can send up to 7200 messages per hour. Which is 7x more than the old hourly rate limit that started at 1000 messages per hour.

Processing changes

This also results in changes on how we handle the rate limiting. In the old system, you could send as many messages as you wanted, and we sent them based on the hourly rate limit.

The new system is based on the number of messages you send in a given second and a 24-hour period. This means that you can send as many messages as your account allows, as long as you don’t exceed the rate limit. If you do, you will get an error.

Why the change?

When we launched Emailit a year ago, we wanted to try to make it different. One of the things we wanted to do was to make it easy to use and to integrate with. Unfortunately, we did exactly the opposite.

It ended up being much more complex to use and to integrate with. We have now simplified the process and made in on par with all the other services out there. This will also help anyone who is migrating from other services to Emailit.

What does this mean for you?

If you are using our API or SMTP and are relying on the scenario, that our API and SMTP accepts all messages, you will need to update your code or configuration.

Most integrations allow you to set a per second rate limit, which should make it easy to migrate. In case you do not have this option, we recommend turning on automatic retrying/queueing of the messages.

You can introduce the new rate limiting in your system at any time, as long as you divide your current hourly rate limit into the new rate limit. Ideally to 2 per second (as this is the default rate limit).

You can find more information about the rate limits in the API Reference.

When will be this changes applied?

The changes will be applied in batches over the next few weeks. We will be sending out emails to all customers to inform you about the changes and how to migrate to the new rate limiting system.