The Importance of Delivery Control

This document contains confidential and proprietary information belonging to Port25 Solutions, Inc. The information in this document may not be disclosed to others, copied or reproduced in any way without the prior permission from Port25 Solutions, Inc. Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.

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The Importance of Delivery ControlWhite Paper 2009

This document contains confidential and proprietary information belonging to Port25 Solutions, Inc. The information in this document may not be disclosed to others, copied or reproduced in any way without the prior permission from Port25 Solutions, Inc. Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary ..............................1

ISPs Limitations and Solutions ..............1

The Power of PowerMTA™ ..................2

About Port25 Solutions, Inc. .................3

The Importance of Delivery Control

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Message throttling is an innovative feature of PowerMTA™. It is often associated with controlling the amount of email that ISPs receive from your network. ISPs often limit the amount of email that is allowed through their network because of high spam complaints and/or suspect domains from a sender. These limitations make it more challenging for legitimate email to reach the inbox. PowerMTA™ is a highly configurable and robust email solution to ensure emails are being delivered at an optimal rate, even if ISPs flag your network. Changes in ISP policy can be met easily with PowerMTA™ and are dynamically adjustable for any ISP threshold. Because PowerMTA™ can make these adjustments with ease, users stay off blocklists for domains and receiving better deliverability with higher throughput rates. PowerMTA™ excels in this regard because it can dynamically adjust to any ISP limitations based on software configuration. A variety of companies benefit from PowerMTA™, including leading email service providers, top financial institutions, major publishers, and well known consumer brands.

In the early years of email, the source of emails could be reliably trusted. In today’s environment, however, trust is no longer freely given; it has to be earned from ISPs. Most ISPs today manage their email servers and other resources against SPAM through limitations on access from unknown sources to the ISP’s network. This can be done via a variety of methods, including: limiting the message per hour rate, greylisting on different intervals, or establishing user complaint thresholds via the spam/junk button in the user’s web-based email interface.

The limits that ISPs have set for email deliverability into their networks have made it increasingly difficult for legitimate bulk emails to successfully reach their customer’s inbox. To this end, a powerful, highly configurable, and extremely robust solution is needed to ensure that emails are delivered in a timely fashion. It is in this environment that PowerMTA™ from Port25 Solutions Inc., excels. With PowerMTA™, anything from global settings for all emails down to settings for individual emails can be uniquely configured to help reach the customer’s inbox.

As the examples below show, strict anti-SPAM policies are now commonly employed by ISPs:

• Comcast has implemented a throttling limit of no more than 2 connections per IP and no more than 1000 recipients per message

• Yahoo has a limit of no more than 5 messages per connection and does not allow sending from dynamic IPs.

• AOL has a limit of no more than 500 messages per connection.

• Hotmail limits connections to 500 with no more than 100 recipients per message.

This document contains confidential and proprietary information belonging to Port25 Solutions, Inc. The information in this document may not be disclosed to others, copied or reproduced in any way without the prior permission from Port25 Solutions, Inc. Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.

PowerMTA™ can easily and effectively meet these policies through its ability to flexibly manage connections and system configurations. That, in turn, means staying off the block lists for these domains, and subsequently, getting better deliverability and higher throughput rates.

Importantly for the above examples, each of the various domains can be configured independently of each other. So in the case of max recipients per message, Comcast could be configured for 1000, while Hotmail can be configured for 100. Thus, PowerMTA™ can control the every aspect of the message stream, as well as several parts of the message itself.

Even with the functionality noted above, there will still be instances where email from your mail server gets de-prioritized by the ISP, resulting in slower delivery and error messages. In this event, PowerMTA™ excels too: it can dynamically adjust to the situation based on how the server is configured. The actions that PowerMTA™ can take include:

• Real-time notifications to an administrator of the issue

• Automatically use a different IP to send the message

• Lowering the amount of connections to the ISP

• Slow down the rate of retrying the messages, so not to “hammer” the ISP

• Limit the amount of messages sent per hour, minute, or second

• Resume normal delivery rates after a set time period

• Resume normal delivery after successful delivery of an email

All of these items help ensure that email continues to flow, without the need to babysit the server. In today’s environment, saved man-hours, coupled with limited downtime, are keys to success for any company or organization. PowerMTA brings you one step closer to achieving positive inbox results, with minimal impact on your business resources.

PowerMTA is a solution specifically designed to manage an increasingly complex delivery landscape and is used widely across a number of verticals. See for yourself how it can help you better manage your I/O messaging streams by contacting Port25 for a free and fully-functional evaluation today.

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This document contains confidential and proprietary information belonging to Port25 Solutions, Inc. The information in this document may not be disclosed to others, copied or reproduced in any way without the prior permission from Port25 Solutions, Inc. Copyright © 2009 All rights reserved.

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ABOUT PORT25 SOLUTIONS, INC.

PowerMTA is specialized, high performance Message Transfer Agent (MTA) software that intelligently and efficiently delivers large volumes of e-mail, allowing for maximum delivery and response. While all-purpose MTAs in use today perform a whole variety of tasks including delivering e-mail, these general solutions fall short both in regards to scalability and relevant feature sets, negatively affecting delivery rates and subsequent ROI. In contrast, PowerMTA was developed for this particular task, helping legitimate, permission based e-mail marketers, publishers, and service providers overcome the business and technology challenges of e-mail message delivery. Companies benefiting from PowerMTA™ include leading email service providers, top financial institutions, major publishers, and well known consumer brands.

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