Case Study: Emma scales to 400M monthly emails with Bird PowerMTA

How Emma uses PowerMTA to increase email volumes efficiently

Emma, a Nashville-based email marketing platform serving more than 45,000 organizations across 51 countries, was facing rapid growth in email volume — reaching nearly 400M messages per month. Its decade-old, home-grown PHP system had become difficult to scale and lacked key capabilities such as flexible retry logic, rate limiting, multiple DKIM signing, and proactive SMTP response handling. Emma turned to Bird, using PowerMTA, to replace the legacy infrastructure and support its expanding digital messaging needs.

Bird implemented PowerMTA to help Emma manage large-scale email delivery efficiently with modest hardware and minimal operational overhead. The solution provided flexible logging, VirtualMTA pools, configurable retry and queue timing, and support for high-volume sending, helping Emma scale to 400M monthly emails and sustain 35% annual growth without bottlenecks or unreasonable expense.

Emma

Marc Powell

Infrastructure Lead