How a flawed implementation of E-mail Service Might have Dropped millions of Opinion on Waqf Amendment Bill 2024 : A Technical Summary
On 30th August 2024, The Joint Committee on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 invited views and suggestions from the Waqf stakeholders including the public, NGOs, experts, and institutions.
For this purpose, an email account jpcwaqf-lss@sansad.nic.in was setup to receive inputs from stakeholders with submission window of just 15 days.
Various stakeholders ran campaigns inviting people to send emails either in rejection or support of the bill. One social media post appears to show that over 1 crore emails were sent against the motion. This begs the question, does the email box in question have capacity to handle such huge flow of emails?
A Simple analysis of the mx records and response from the bounce email reveals that the email is routed to a Google Workspace account (Gmail).
Since the email address is using Gmail, it’s imperative to explore the limits. Google Workspace email boxes currently have a daily limit of approximately 86,000 emails that can be received by a single account. Over the course of the 15 days, this translates to a maximum of 12.9 lakh emails. This means Gmail/Google Workspace error related to email throttling could have simply led to loss of a significant number of emails and most of the emails may have bounced.
Flawed technical implementation for an email of such important magnitude raises a concern that the people or side first to send emails in this issue are going to get more recognition and this whole exercise of inviting public opinion through email may be flawed and results may be skewed toward first movers.
An Alternative approach to such a situation where a huge number of emails are expected should involve receiving emails to a storage service like ServerMango ColdStore or AWS S3, instead of mailbox, from where it might be later retrieved, analysed and worked upon.