Mailjet: Sending 1.5 billion emails monthly with Google Cloud
About Mailjet
Mailjet is the European market leader in sending marketing and transactional emails. With offices in 8 countries and more than 100,000 customers in 150 countries, the company provides an intuitive email editor that automatically creates emails adapted to different terminals—computers, cell phones, tablets— an easily integrable API, and SMTP relay functions.
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Contact usThanks to Google Cloud, Mailjet sends 1.5 billion secure marketing and transactional emails every month, enabling its customers to obtain best-in-class delivery, open, and click rates.
Google Cloud Results
- Provides development, testing, and distribution infrastructure for Mailjet
- Smoothly absorbs up to 20X normal computing power
- Offers technical and economic flexibility on a pay-per-use basis, depending on the computing power consumed
Doubled the number of emails sent each year
Mailjet allows companies to create, send, and track millions of emails to their customers and prospects around the world each month. The company’s offerings range from routing these emails to tailor-made tools that allow clients to design and send marketing campaigns with messages related to sales, user clubs, coupons and discounts, and promotions, as well as transactional emails such as purchase confirmations, shipping confirmations, e-tickets, or password resets.
"All of our services are accessible through programming interfaces. We use the same APIs for ourselves and for our customers. This is part of our unique selling point, which is to make life easier for developers and marketers," explains François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager at Mailjet.
The company scrupulously monitors its service quality to help ensure that emails sent on behalf of its customers don’t trigger spam filters, and that they obtain the best possible open and click rates.
"We are able to activate Compute Engine virtual machines on demand, without needing to reserve these instances. While the machine remains active, a sliding-scale price is applied, which is particularly attractive to us."
—François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager, MailjetFrom hosting to the cloud
In its early years, Mailjet used hosted servers. This model had several disadvantages. It was impossible to instantly activate or deactivate computing power; the company could not be charged for actual, to-the-minute usage; and it lacked the flexibility to add disk space or scale servers in real time.
At the beginning of 2016, Mailjet decided to switch to the public cloud in order to improve technical and economic flexibility. "This two-year evolution required us to review our developments. If we use a virtual machine even for just one hour, our computer code must be able to support it in order to preserve the consistency and integrity of the data and processes," says Fanuel.
Mailjet and Google were already partners. The marketing and transactional email specialist is one of only three providers in the world, and the only one in Europe, accredited by Google to send bulk emails through Google Cloud. The choice—based on three main factors—was obvious.
"We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor."
—François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager, MailjetFinancial and technical considerations
Factor 1: the right price proportionality. "We are able to activate Compute Engine virtual machines on demand, without needing to reserve these instances. While the machine remains active, a sliding-scale price is applied, which is particularly attractive to us," explains Fanuel.
Factor 2: the quality and level of technical communication. Mailjet has direct access to Google Cloud engineers when required. The company has its own IP addressing infrastructure, which is the foundation of its service quality. "We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor." Since then, via specific tunnels, Mailjet IP addresses have been ported directly into Compute Engine.
Factor 3: conformity to international data regulations. Mailjet is the only email service provider to be ISO 27001 certified and GDPR-ready, enabling the company to offer its clients the highest level of data security and privacy. Google Cloud is also ISO 27001 certified, which was an important factor for Mailjet.
Power through minimalism
In mid-2016, Mailjet replaced its 30 or so email sending servers installed at a hosting company with smaller Compute Engine virtual machines, using the automatic load-balancing function. "Using smaller virtual machines—but more of them—optimized our computing power." This precision mechanism accompanied an increase in activity for the company, with the number of emails sent doubling every year. As for the company's some 300 TB of data, this is stored in Cloud Storage.
The flexibility and power of Google Cloud helps ensure that Mailjet can adapt to peaks in activity that can reach up to 20 times the normal flow—our customers usually send their messages at the same times and during the same peak periods. "Previously, we had to reserve a lot of computing power with our hosting company, equivalent to 150 servers. Moving to an on-demand infrastructure means we can avoid paying a disproportionate fixed annual cost."
Google Cloud also provides Mailjet with the infrastructure needed to process events centrally, which facilitates technical support. A new analytics dashboard in the making will provide customers access to their campaigns’ key metrics in real time—a circulation report, open rates, and click-through rates, as well as invalid email addresses— regardless of the volume of emails at stake.
"Google Cloud delivers on all the promises of a public cloud: service customization, real-time computing power adjustment during periods of high and low demand, and instant activation of computing resources. For us, it's the best possible ratio between price, performance, availability, and quality."
—François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager, MailjetFrom distribution to development
Following routing operations, the development environment is currently being ported to Google Cloud, and will eventually represent 100 virtual servers. "The addition of any new code is iteratively tested in Google Cloud. We benefit from machines that are custom made for our needs, from machines with one core and 3 gigabytes of memory, up to machines with 64 cores."
Mailjet uses the Cloud Interconnect virtual private network to tailor sending flows by geographical location. "For customers who only use our routing service, we will soon have worldwide load balancers. This will help ensure their API requests are received and their emails are sent to Europe and America from one single IP point, thus avoiding transatlantic latency issues."
Mailjet also uses the Identity Aware Proxy authentication tool. All its employees around the world benefit from unique, more secure access, whether they use Google Sites intranets, or the development, or production environment. "Google Cloud delivers on all the promises of a public cloud: service customization, real-time computing power adjustment during periods of high and low demand, and instant activation of computing resources. For us, it's the best possible ratio between price, performance, availability, and quality," concludes Fanuel.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Mailjet
Mailjet is the European market leader in sending marketing and transactional emails. With offices in 8 countries and more than 100,000 customers in 150 countries, the company provides an intuitive email editor that automatically creates emails adapted to different terminals—computers, cell phones, tablets— an easily integrable API, and SMTP relay functions.