One day you will be here to feel
When V12 Group set out to build its Launchpad Marketing Platform, email marketing was a central component of the platform. Launchpad provides a lightweight marketing automation platform for existing customers for highly targeted and personalized campaigns across multiple channels. With more than 8,000 platform users, 85 percent of which are brand-name retailers, reaching out to 110M US households, V12 needed an MTA (Messaging Transfer Agent) that would execute high delivery rates, offer more control, and easily enable the latest authentication protocols. THE CHALLENGE Before PowerMTA™ was installed into their technology stack, the V12 Group had tried outsourcing their email marketing to various email service bureaus (ESBs) but turnaround times, lack of client-level customization, poor delivery rates, and slow delivery speeds shifted the company’s focus to a reliable internal solution. Before they built Launchpad on the PowerMTA™ platform, V12 Group had used an out of the box email marketing platform. They had worked with the vendor to add some customization, but it still fell short of their needs and they had to fall back on their ESB to handle volume during peak seasons. THE SOLUTION “When we decided to build our Launchpad marketing technology, the email aspect of the platform was our priority. We researched various commercial and open-source MTAs on the market and selected PowerMTA™ for its lightweight code, ease of integration, flexible configuration, IP-based sending control and VirtualMTA technology” said V12 Group’s CIO Ray Estevez. V12 Group was able to granularly configure, integrate, and fine-tune PMTA for use within the Launchpad platform using PowerMTA™’s flexible APIs. Granular application of delivery policies and delivery rates through PowerMTA™ allow Launchpad to achieve an inbox placement rate of 90 percent. VirtualMTA gives Launchpad’s PowerMTA™ server the capacity to segment delivery into multiple mail streams with unique IP addresses and different delivery policies for each IP, or VirtualMTA, for additional control. PowerMTAv4.5 includes an IP rate limiting feature which allows V12 Group to control the number of delivery attempts within a specified time frame for each VirtualMTA, which further contributes delivery success on the Launchpad platform. With functionalities like Multiple DKIM Signing Support, PowerMTA™ supports Launchpad’s successful delivery to other popular email providers, including Gmail, by routing mail to the inbox. V12 Group’s architects and engineers continue to use the delivery metrics tools, including web-based status monitoring and real-time data access, to optimize Launchpad’s delivery controls. “Once we are hooked in, the automated delivery controls allow us to easily customize settings to meet rigorous sending volumes,” said Estevez. “We can focus on innovation across the platform with the knowledge that our customers get responsive email delivery as part of their digital marketing plans.” Estevez added that this helps them maximize ROI for their customers. QUOTE “V12 Group’s Launchpad marketing application has endless throughput delivery capacity thanks in part to PowerMTA™. We were able integrate PMTA into Launchpad with ease. Its granular delivery controls and authentication/accreditation tools have allowed us to consistently achieve great delivery for our clients. V12 Group has utilized PowerMTA™ for over four years. Thank you, Port25, for being such a great technology partner.” source: https://www.port25.com/new-case-study-v12-group-sustains-customer-satisfaction-by-deploying-powermta-for-launchpad/
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Sometimes, a software company is as much about people as it is about technology. Who says PowerMTA admins don’t have influence? Not only are they the influencers of our brand [Port25] they are also the main influencers and decision-makers when it comes to purchasing decisions. With the increased demand for PowerMTA evaluations and a shortfall of experienced PowerMTA administrators, enterprises and ESPs that deploy PowerMTA are finding it challenging to administer ever-increasing levels of unilateral (on premise, in-house) and bi-lateral (hybrid: both on premise and cloud) deployments. This demand has begun to surface in unfilled positions as companies that deploy PowerMTA as a platform are noticing a severe shortage of experienced PowerMTA admins throughout the US and Europe. Some of the people stepping up to fill that demand are coming from the last place you would expect. You’ll have to wait to the end to find out where. At small ESPs, you might find the delivery administrator wearing many different hats, including trouble shooting customer facing non-technical delivery questions and also managing the technical aspects of the MTA such as analyzing log files. At larger enterprises and maturing ESPs, you find customer facing delivery teams separate from the technical delivery teams or pure MTA administrators. Here is a quote from an experienced delivery admin at a large ESP: “Our attempt to hire a senior PowerMTA admin was a complete failure. To quote my director, “there are none.” I would make two statements. Those that know SMTP are very rare. The other comment is that the pecking order in tech is as follows:
Outside of organizations that send email on behalf of others, MTA admins are a merely “nice to have,” or “extras.” In addition, outsourcing message streams to the cloud has become viable alternative for some enterprises. Authorized PowerMTA consultants such at companies like Postmastery, founded by Maarten Oelering, are seeing a sharp increase in demand for consulting services both domestically and abroad. This is not necessarily something new, but demand has spiked over the past quarter. Through his encounters with PowerMTA admins, he posits: “the PowerMTA admin position is a “task” and not a “job”. The people I know that do PowerMTA administration have a broader set of skills and duties, related to email deliverability, or related to system administration.” Deliverability administrators at some of the largest senders in the world (companies like ExactTarget, now a Salesforce company), have asked me to help them find experienced PowerMTA administrators for both remote and in-house opportunities. ExactTarget and Pardot, both deploy on the PowerMTA platform and both owned by SalesForce, send close to 1B emails per day. This number continues to grow, according to a source at ExactTarget. Further, at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), we’re looking at facilitating a PowerMTA training session at an upcoming meeting, perhaps Philadelphia or Paris. The goal of this training session is two-fold: to introduce PowerMTA to new IT admins and to hone the skills of experienced PowerMTA admins, and prepare them to enter the workforce at larger enterprises. Students entering ongoing one-day workshops will be introduced to out of the box delivery settings and configurations that ISPs and the dev team at PowerMTA recommend. They will also learn advanced bounce management logging analysis from integrations with Splunk and Kabana from ElasticSearch, among others essential tools for up and coming admins at maturing ESPs. That surprising source of new MTA admin talent? Hollywood. Actress Katie Holmes was recently interviewed by Email Service Provider Listrak to take on a PowerMTA admin position that would include managing privacy and compliance. Gwyneth Paltrow just accepted a PowerMTA position with ESP Pinpointe, where she will be working closely with Craig Stouffer. I also know a well-known ESP based in New York has hired a PowerMTA admin with some history working in Hollywood. Her name has not been released, but rumor has it that it might be Kathy Bates. Hard to believe , but Cindy Crawford is finally getting out of modeling: she recently was interviewed by the delivery team at MyEmma and hopes to come on board in short order as a PowerMTA admin working closely with Marc Powell and Art Quanstrom. Is it April yet? Amid this shortage of PowerMTA administrators, development for both enterprise and standard editions PowerMTA has never been more robust. And, I’ll release more wonderful news about PowerMTA in the very near future. If you are a PowerMTA consultant or a vendor who supports PowerMTA, I’d love to hear from you. Keep an eye out for that M3AAWG training certification course at M3AAWG source : https://www.port25.com/perfect-storm-brewing-at-esps-amid-growing-pmta-admin-shortage/
With the recent Mandrill announcement, there’s been a lot of coverage of SparkPost in the industry lately. While this has been a great time for the company as a whole, I want to give you an update on Port25, as things here are going very well.
When the acquisition of Port25 by Message Systems (now SparkPost) was announced, there was a great deal of fear for the future of our company — and more importantly – what it meant for the loyal users of our PowerMTA product. But as they say, “the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated”. Now a year later, it seems like a good time to let you all in on how the integration went and to lay those fears to rest. The initial transition was swift but went impressively smoothly. We moved to the SparkPost offices, met our new colleagues and found that the corporate culture wasn’t all that different from our own. Even our LAN’s IP addresses fit in nicely. Sure, our old offices were quieter, but along with the noise came additional email technology experts to collaborate with, not to mention the added support of company resources like IT and HR. Despite these changes, the most important things remained consistent. I continue to lead the very same PowerMTA/PMC team, and we’re even looking to hire an additional engineer to expand the team (Know any great engineers? We’d love to meet them). We continue to work in the same manner as before, setting our goals, writing code test-first, and doing our daily scrum meetings. Work on PowerMTA and the PMC also continues normally. We released v4.5 / v1.5 last year followed by a few micro-releases since. The next update (spoiler alert!) should include MX-based queue roll-ups and SMTPUTF8 support. I’m excited to finally launch the MX-based roll-ups, as I remember thinking about this some 17 years ago, before Port25 was even founded. There are other cool features we’re working on, but I don’t want to get too much ahead of myself. We’re also taking advantage of the new resources and team to train additional support engineers on PowerMTA, providing wider coverage to Port25 customers. As PowerMTA’s original author, I’d love for it to enjoy a long life, and I can say today that SparkPost feels like a good home for it. source: https://www.port25.com/an-update-on-port25-and-the-future-of-powermta-one-year-later/ In PowerMTA v4.5 and later versions messages can now be scheduled for delivery. This may be very useful for instances when it takes a long time to build a campaign or if there is a need to have a campaign go out very quickly (e.g. flash sales); therefore, the campaign needs to be in the queue and ready for delivery at the start of the event. The feature allows for scheduling multiple delivery windows. The use of scheduled delivery in PowerMTA requires the addition of an x-schedule header to the email prior to injection into PowerMTA. The format of the header is: x-schedule: <start time - 1>/<end time - 1>, <start time - 2>/<end time -2> Here is an example: x-schedule: 2016-12-29 17:01:00 / 2016-12-29 17:30:00, 2016-12-30 17:01:00 / 2016-12-30 17:30:00 In the above example message, delivery will be started at 5:01pm (PowerMTA server time) on Dec 29, 2016. The delivery attempts will stop at 5:30pm Dec 29, 2016. Delivery attempts will resume on Dec 30, 2016 at 5:01pm, and if not delivered will bounce out of queue on Dec 30, 2016 at 5:30pm. As many delivery windows as needed are allowed, as long as the headers are folded so each line is not longer than 1000 characters. The bounce-after does not apply to recipients scheduled for delivery with the x-schedule header. The schedule overrides the defined bounce-after and the message is bounced when there are no more schedules to try. In addition, if the queue is in retry mode when the messages are injected, the message delivery will not start at the window start time, but rather message delivery attempts will start when the queue comes out of retry mode. For strict adherence to the schedule start time for large campaigns (e.g. flash sales), it is required to set the same jobID for all recipients of the given campaign. For best results, customers should ideally use the same schedule for all the recipients in a job, and not mix scheduled and unscheduled recipients in a job. Messages with the combination of Scheduled Delivery Control and a jobID will use the start time defined by the first message for the job injected into the queue. For example, if the first recipient in the queue for jobID 123 has a start time of 12pm, and the second recipient injected into the queue for the same jobID has a start time of 11am, the 12pm start time will be used for both recipients. Likewise, if the first recipient in the queue for jobID 123 has a start time of 11am, and the second recipient injected into the queue for the same jobID has a start time of 12pm, the 11am start time will be used for both recipients.
source : https://www.port25.com/more-on-powermtas-scheduled-delivery-control/ Cloud-based interest in email infrastructure trended up this past quarter. Port25, a Message Systems Company, tracks cloud-based interest (CBIs) among large volume senders based on evaluation and purchase requests received, in conjunction with overall site engagement. In Q3, CBIs on Port25’s website grew by 34.97% over Q2, to a total of 48.2% of unique evaluation and purchase requests. Essentially half of all visitors who made inquiries at the www.port25.com site were interested in learning more about cloud-based infrastructure for email. Port25’s CBI number has been hovering around 38% of unique evaluation requests since Q1 of 2015 , so this uptick represents a significant upward spike in interest in cloud solutions. This mirrors general industry trends, which place public cloud services on a trajectory to grow 17% in 2016 over 2015. This growth represents a 22% increase in SaaS and a whopping 43% growth in infrastructure as a service (IaaS). To arrive at our trend numbers, we placed data from unique inquiries into five different volume bins, based on a client’s maximum email messages per hour: less than 10K, 10K-50K, 50K-250K, 250K-1M, and 1M+. The 1M+ category includes some very large senders, since Port25 has customers who send more than 1B emails in a given 24-hour period. Every visitor in this data set completed a minimum of two and a maximum of nine events per session. The data has been normalized by placing visitors into event bins 2 through 9. Each event includes an action such as a knowledge base download, form submission, support request, button click, etc. The number of users who opted-in to receive cloud-based information rose most among smaller senders. In Q3, 31.34% of visitors who expressed interest in CBI fell into the volume bin of less than 10K per hour, while 25.36% of requests were generated by senders who mail 10K-50K per hour. Among the larger senders, CBI is much lower: roughly 14.81% across the larger sending volume categories expressed interest in cloud services. That number is consistent with the highest volume bin of over 1M per hour, which had a CBI of 14.25%. Our data suggests that, while senders in the less than 10K category appreciate the convenience of cloud-based email infrastructure, a stronger driver may be that small ESPs lack the resources needed to manage complex tasks involved in hosting their own sending infrastructure in house. Moving to a cloud-based email infrastructure can be a cost-effective way for smaller ESPs to meet their investment objectives, maintain security, and outsource the administrative knowledge needed to manage increasing volumes of email while properly configuring server requirements. The largest service providers, (the top 1% of ESPs) have been reticent to migrate to the cloud due to the complexity of their sending environments. One understandable constraint, mentioned to Port25 by a large ESP in Germany, is that large ESPs don’t want to relinquish control of their reputable IP addresses. Reputation aside, certain SLAs among large senders prohibit them from releasing sensitive customer data to a third party. In addition, high volume senders generally require some degree of custom integration to create a seamless hybrid cloud infrastructure. Concerns about integration may be holding back some larger email senders from using cloud-based services. These headwinds are mitigated by the growing number of small and midsize ESPs that understand the economic and administrative benefits of a cloud solution for email infrastructure. They are driving the huge growth in API-driven cloud email infrastructure solutions that systematically integrate with any existing front-end email platform. In time, this trend may move large ESPs to jump on board. Even now, while CBI is not as great among our higher volume customers, Port25 has successfully on-boarded dozens of large enterprises in our ecosystem to the cloud. This article is taken from : https://www.port25.com/interest-in-cloud-based-email-infrastructure-grows-by-35-in-3rd-quarter-of-2016/
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