Case Study: Emma achieves scalable, cost-efficient high-volume email delivery with Bird (formerly MessageBird)

Emma Clears a Path to Rapid Growth with PowerMTA™

Emma, a Nashville-based email service provider powering campaigns for more than 45,000 organizations, faced rapidly rising volumes (currently ~1.5M hourly, 12M daily, 375M monthly) and a 10-year-old PHP system that had reached the end of its scalability. To preserve its Event-Driven Architecture and deliver real-time, personalized messaging features at scale, Emma turned to Bird (formerly MessageBird) and adopted a high-performance mail transfer solution (PowerMTA) to replace its brittle home-grown platform.

Using PowerMTA through Bird (formerly MessageBird), Emma implemented flexible VirtualMTA pools, advanced retry and queue controls, DKIM/rate-limiting capabilities, and enhanced logging — enabling large-volume sending on modest hardware. The solution removed bottlenecks and lowered cost and deployment complexity, allowing Emma to reliably support 45,000+ customers across 51 countries and handle current volumes that are expected to double in the near term.

Emma

Marc Powell

Infrastructure Lead