I’d like to mention our most recently “live” customer project. We have a customer whose business is to send high-volume opt-in outbound email. (Think electronic newsletters, account statements and so on.) The sending of high-volume mail is quite tricky as it turns out, so this might become a series of blog posts. Who knows? For now, I’d like to focus on just one part of it.
To efficiently send high volume mail outbound, you must look at what is not getting through. This could include “account no longer exists,” “user over quota,” and other permanent or transient reasons why the message for a given user is not accepted by the mail server at the other end.
Our customer’s existing bounce handling system is a black box that has not offered all of the functionality required by the customer. The black box vendor claimed (years ago) that by going with their solution, the customer would have an automated solution that meets their needs fully. This would be great, if only it were true – and if only there were some way to measure that those claims were accurate.
Our job was to accept to set up a high-capacity front-line system for handling all of those bounces, auto-replies, and opt-out emails. Everything is accepted by our Sentrion servers, and is then sent on to two different paths. One email path is to send the original message on to the existing solution at the customer site, preserving existing functionality. The other email path is that an exact copy of the original message is analyzed and then sent on to systems running the massively scalable Sentrion Quarantine server, an IMAP-accessible message store that provides automatic cleanup of messages once they are no longer needed.
Since the “go-live” date, we have seen some interesting things by having the Sentrions between the customers and this black box solution. This has allowed us to work together with the customer to fine tune their HA approach. To better identify, track, process, and route the different types of email coming in. In addition, we’ve begun the process of adding the new functionality this customer has been looking for.
The moral of this story.
There’s benefit to putting a standard solution like the Sentrion between your customers and any kind of “black box” solution you may have. This customer now has the visibility into the email process that they’ve been after for years – but without affecting the overall delivery or processing times.