Sending bulk emails via Office 365 SMTP in Indico

Administrators
1

Hello,

I’m setting up Indico to manage a conference for the first time.
As part of the workflow, I may need to send notification emails to multiple users at once for example, to all abstract submitters or all registered participants (bulk or batch email).

However, my organization uses Office 365 SMTP for outgoing mail, and I understand that Office 365 imposes certain rate limits on email sending.

I would like to ask:

  • How does Indico handle bulk email sending?

  • Is there a built-in throttling or queue mechanism to prevent hitting SMTP rate limits?

  • Are there recommended settings or best practices for integrating Indico with Office 365 in such cases?

Thank you in advance for your help and advice!

2

How does Indico handle bulk email sending?

It sends the emails to the configured SMTP server. If there’s a temporary failure, it retries (w/ increasing delay) up to 10 times before giving up.

Is there a built-in throttling or queue mechanism to prevent hitting SMTP rate limits?

SMTP per se does not have rate limits, and has no way of communicating rate limits in a standard way that code would understand.

Are there recommended settings or best practices for integrating Indico with Office 365 in such cases?

I’d say ideally you have a SMTP server that accepts the emails and then does whatever throttling etc. is needed to make M365 happy.

You could also use some emailing service that provides you an SMTP intereface w/o the weird restrictions imposed by M365.

However, for most events you may not run into any rate limits unless you have thousands of participants…

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