Azure Email Communication Service is slow (30 seconds to send email)

Question

Azure Email Communication Service is slow (30 seconds to send email)

37298796 15

When I use Azure Email Communication Services, it takes approximately 30 seconds to send per email, which is extremely slow. I've tried reusing the emailClient to see if subsequent emails are faster, but they're not. I've tried both the default Microsoft "DoNotReply" sender address as well as a custom domain sender address, and they both take about the same time.

Here is the line of code that takes so long.

var emailResult = await emailClient.SendAsync(Azure.WaitUntil.Completed, emailMessage);

This poses a few questions:

Is this because it's currently in Preview, or is this how long I should expect?
Perhaps I need to configure something in Azure?
Something else I haven't thought of?

SnehaAgrawal-MSFT 22,706 Reputation points Moderator

2023-03-13T07:49:50.5+00:00

Thanks for reaching here! Could you please confirm what's the volume?

As sending a high volume of messages has a set of limitations on the number of email messages you can send. If you hit these limits, your messages won't be queued to be sent. You can submit these requests again, once the Retry-After time expires.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/service-limits#rate-limits

Further It may be affected due to network latency or the size of the email As you mentioned that the line var emailResult = await emailClient.SendAsync(Azure.WaitUntil.Completed, emailMessage); is the one that takes the longest time.

You may want to know that SendAsync method is an asynchronous operation that sends the email message and waits until the operation is completed.

Further to troubleshoot issues related to email delivery, you can get status of the email delivery to capture delivery details, this might me helpful in knowing reason of latency and narrow down the issue.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/quickstarts/email/send-email?tabs=windows&pivots=platform-azcli#get-the-status-of-the-email-delivery

Let us know.
LiJia Liu 175 Reputation points MVP

2023-03-13T09:11:45.67+00:00

For Service limits for Azure Communication Services, could you please check the log to do the analysis on whether you hit the throttling limitation.
37298796 15 Reputation points

2023-03-14T14:52:51.9033333+00:00

I'm sending a single email and I'm the only one using the service (in development environment), so there should be no throttling limits hit. The email is extremely small just to confirm it was sent out. All it says is "Email Connectivity Test". I'm just sending to a single user (me).

I don't believe it's a network latency issue. I'm at my office which has very good service.

I do understand SendAsync is an asynchronous operation that waits until the email is completed. At worst I would expect this to be a second or two. More likely I expect it to be a few hundred milliseconds like other email services.

I appreciate any help you can give! Thanks :)
37298796 15 Reputation points

2023-03-14T15:08:02.88+00:00

I'm only sending a single email and nobody else is using the service. Throttling issues could not have been hit. I don't think it's the network latency either because I'm in the office which has very good internet service. The email I'm sending is just a very simple test message saying "Email Connectivity Test".

Note: I previously made a comment responding to the follow-up questions and the comment simply disappeared. I'm not sure why. If you see redundant comments from me, that's why.
SnehaAgrawal-MSFT 22,706 Reputation points Moderator

2023-03-17T08:54:55.2466667+00:00

@37298796 Just checking if you have chance to see recent response.

Please let us know if further query or issue remains.

Please accept as "Yes" if the answer provided is useful , so that you can help others in the community looking for remediation for similar issues.

3 answers

Your answer

SnehaAgrawal-MSFT 22,706 Reputation points Moderator

2023-03-13T07:49:50.5+00:00

Thanks for reaching here! Could you please confirm what's the volume?

As sending a high volume of messages has a set of limitations on the number of email messages you can send. If you hit these limits, your messages won't be queued to be sent. You can submit these requests again, once the Retry-After time expires.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/service-limits#rate-limits

Further It may be affected due to network latency or the size of the email As you mentioned that the line var emailResult = await emailClient.SendAsync(Azure.WaitUntil.Completed, emailMessage); is the one that takes the longest time.

You may want to know that SendAsync method is an asynchronous operation that sends the email message and waits until the operation is completed.

Further to troubleshoot issues related to email delivery, you can get status of the email delivery to capture delivery details, this might me helpful in knowing reason of latency and narrow down the issue.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/quickstarts/email/send-email?tabs=windows&pivots=platform-azcli#get-the-status-of-the-email-delivery

Let us know.
LiJia Liu 175 Reputation points MVP

2023-03-13T09:11:45.67+00:00

For Service limits for Azure Communication Services, could you please check the log to do the analysis on whether you hit the throttling limitation.
37298796 15 Reputation points

2023-03-14T14:52:51.9033333+00:00

I'm sending a single email and I'm the only one using the service (in development environment), so there should be no throttling limits hit. The email is extremely small just to confirm it was sent out. All it says is "Email Connectivity Test". I'm just sending to a single user (me).

I don't believe it's a network latency issue. I'm at my office which has very good service.

I do understand SendAsync is an asynchronous operation that waits until the email is completed. At worst I would expect this to be a second or two. More likely I expect it to be a few hundred milliseconds like other email services.

I appreciate any help you can give! Thanks :)
37298796 15 Reputation points

2023-03-14T15:08:02.88+00:00

I'm only sending a single email and nobody else is using the service. Throttling issues could not have been hit. I don't think it's the network latency either because I'm in the office which has very good internet service. The email I'm sending is just a very simple test message saying "Email Connectivity Test".

Note: I previously made a comment responding to the follow-up questions and the comment simply disappeared. I'm not sure why. If you see redundant comments from me, that's why.
SnehaAgrawal-MSFT 22,706 Reputation points Moderator

2023-03-17T08:54:55.2466667+00:00

@37298796 Just checking if you have chance to see recent response.

Please let us know if further query or issue remains.

Please accept as "Yes" if the answer provided is useful , so that you can help others in the community looking for remediation for similar issues.

Answer 1

Kris Blom 5

I had the exact same issue, but when I read this thread I learned that WaitUntil.Started is what I needed. Works great now. Thank you for posting the great question and to Microsoft for the great answer.

Answer 2

SnehaAgrawal-MSFT 22,706 Moderator

37298796 Sure, Thanks for reply! Email send is an asynchronous operation, which means our service accepts it immediately but will asynchronously try to send it in the backend.

You can poll for the status of email send request. If you look at the above call, it does automatic polling in the backend (since first parameter is WaitUntil.Completed).

You can also use WaitUntil.Started which will return immediately. In this case, they can poll for the status using EmailSendOperation.UpdateStatus() at a faster interval if you want.

There is a sample for this in our github samples - communication-services-dotnet-quickstarts/SendEmailAdvanced/SendEmailWithManualPollingForStatus at main · Azure-Samples/communication-services-dotnet-quickstarts · GitHub

Let us know if further query or issue remains.

Mack Moreno 0 Reputation points

2023-09-06T15:11:31.83+00:00

I'm having the same issue, I'm using the Power Automate connector, so no configuration options are available, actually I'm trying to send over 10000 mails, but it is sending at a very slow rate. What did I miss?
Efraín Ayala Herrera 30 Reputation points

2024-01-02T23:15:44.1466667+00:00
HI.

I have just implemented this service using Python, how can we set the WailUntil.Started parameter?

poller = client.begin_send(message) result = poller.result()

Answer 3

Hello @SnehaAgrawal-MSFT

I'm running into the same problem with Azure Communication Service for email and python. That has the two effects:

Bad experiance for my app users to wait for 15-20 sec. for all functions that trigger an email in the backend (e.g. PW Reset)
some functions in the backend run into a timeout while waiting for Azure Communication Service status.

I use the sample code for python:

message = {
    "content": {
        "subject": "This is the subject",
        "plainText": "This is the body",
        "html": "<html><h1>This is the body</h1></html>"
    },
    "recipients": {
        "to": / "cc": / "bcc": [...]
    },
    "senderAddress": "******@contoso.com"
}
poller = email_client.begin_send(message)
#result = poller.result() -->Commented out programme command

I'm wondering if this is a good idea to commented the result poller. At least it solved my problem of the delay in the program.

Is email_client.begin_send function having a configuration like the sms service with wait_until_started=True as discripted here: Why sending a mail using Azure email communication service is too slow?

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Azure Email Communication Service is slow (30 seconds to send email)

3 answers

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