Over the past several months I’ve had the opportunity, along with several of my colleagues, to assist several new and pre-existing customers in modernizing the portion of their internal Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) backbone responsible for routing application-generated email messages. According to the customers we’ve worked with on these types of projects, the key business and technical factors that served as the catalyst for the SMTP application relaying modernization efforts included some, or all, of the items listed below.
- Outdated, expensive and inefficient hardware and software.
- Extremely limited or nonexistent capability to make intelligent real-time routing decisions based on message content.
- Limited visibility of how many applications are actually relaying mail.
- Production email delays or outages due to the following:
- Rogue applications flooding the application relaying channel with large numbers of email messages and/or connections.
- Internet Service Providers blacklisting outbound email servers as a result of too many messages or connections being sent or made within a particular time period.
- Desire to increase the percentage of email messages successfully delivered to the intended recipient.
- Desire to protect their companies email reputation.
- Desire to protect their customers from fraudulent email messages.
- The need to have a solution in place that can track and report on messages that end up being returned as undeliverable. A lack of clean and manageable reporting data regarding undeliverable email messages perpetuates the cycle of out-of-date and inaccurate internal mailing lists which, left unchanged, simply create an ever increasing amount of undeliverable email messages.
Sendmail has had great success providing its customers with solutions that address each of the key business drivers detailed above. I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts that specifically address the challenges of managing email generating applications. I’ll also talk about how we’ve helped businesses modernize their SMTP application relaying infrastructures. Do you have similar requirements for your email generating applications? Let me know, and stay tuned for future posts on this topic.