Ask HN: What is the cost of sending an email? - burnbabyburn
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burnMFburn
I believe op is asking what is the "total" the cost of the internet
infrastructure (so power, hw, administration, etc).

most of the replies here are approaching the question from the view of the
sender's host point of view ignoring the server cost of the destination and
the middle servers (??-- actually I don't know if the emails are still doing
"hops" and using middle servers!?)

the calculation is even more difficult to be replied because different
currencies and economies are being involved

yo, kose

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buro9
To whom? I mean... who is the sender here?

Different parties have different prices depending on who they are and where in
the system they exist, the type of email, the volume, and so on.

A super simple answer may be: Look up the price according to Mailgun or
SendGrid, and a simple answer is that it costs $1 to send ~4,000 emails.

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pboutros
$ mail burn@baby.burn

Subject: What is the cost of sending an email?

That's a really good question, BBB. The answer depends on a lot of things --
privately hosted? Using OSS only? Benefiting from the scale of a Google? How
many emails are you sending on a monthly basis (since that will bring down
fixed costs).

.

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anotheryou
Very hard to say.

For spammers with hacked machines: 0

Should this cost include hardware? Than it costs me at least the 1000 bucks my
computer costs.

If not including the setup, than it's just the extra electricity that is used
when a mail comes through as opposed to when no email comes through. I think
this is the only value where it would be possible to clearly define it.

~~~
dwils098
Cost of the machine is amortized over the number of e-mail sent, in other
words OP is more interested in the average cost of sending an e-mail message,
using statistical approximation... (i.e.: sending an e-mail from USA to China
on average requires x amount of servers, middle-servers, data-centers, and
these process y amount of requests per minute, with a cost of operation of z
on average per minute, etc.)

see: [https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-send-an-
email...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-send-an-
email/answer/John-Kurlak?srid=CXzs)

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zajd
What is the cost of sending mail?

What are you sending? Who are you sending it to?

The only thing email simplifies is how it gets there

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restapi
Including 'opportunity costs'?

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apolymath
depending on who you send an email to and the contents of the email, it could
cost you your life...

