MailPilot

• Email scheduling system built to send emails reliably at a future time
• Uses background jobs instead of cron-based scheduling
• Designed with production reliability in mind

Problem

• Cron jobs fail on server restarts
• Scheduled tasks can be lost during crashes
• Scaling cron-based systems is difficult

How it works

• User schedules an email from the frontend
• Backend stores schedule and metadata in MySQL
• A delayed job is added to Redis using BullMQ
• Worker processes the job at the scheduled time
• Email is sent and status is updated

Tech stack

Frontend

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS

Backend

• Next.js API routes
• Node.js

Queue

• Redis
• BullMQ

Database

• MySQL

Why Redis and BullMQ

• Jobs persist even if the server restarts
• Built-in retries with backoff
• Workers can scale independently

Failure handling

• Failed emails are retried automatically
• Jobs are not lost on crashes
• Backoff prevents repeated failures

Setup

• Clone the repository
• Install dependencies
• Start Redis
• Run dev server
• Run worker

Author

• Prince Jain