Email is still the number one tool for managing events and communicating with attendees, speakers, and exhibitors. Social network is definitely the future of the event communication, but until then email rules.
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Sending out call for papers, speaker, exhibitor, attendee invitations and other emails around a conference can require a well oiled email infrastructure to make sure emails get into the inbox.
I see events send anywhere from a few hundred to several million emails over the life span of an event. Sending emails in the cloud can work well whether your sending a small amount using Google Apps or millions using Amazon Web Services.
- Google Apps is a quick way for events to setup email at their domain and not worry about email delivery, receipt and SPAM. It has a 500 daily limit on how much you can send, but works well for smaller events.
- Amazon Web Services provides even more industrial strength when it comes to larger events and conferences
Amazon provides the necessary computing power to get emails out the door efficiently. Now that Amazon allows for reverse DNS on reserved IP addresses it makes Amazon a viable solution for permanent and temporary email infrastructure.
I often scale primary email infrastructure from 1 POP / SMTP server to 3 during an event to support ongoing daily emails. I also will scale up to 10 SMTP servers for 24 hour periods to support large scale email blasts.
Amazon EC2 is the computing power, and
Amazon S3 is great storage for emails, logs, and more. With a proper plan strategy, email in the clouds is possible.
