Traffic congestion is a pretty simple and sometimes frustrating concept that anyone who lives in urban areas will be able to relate to.
To avoid an entire city going into a standstill, we toss some tax dollars to the local authorities to ensure that traffic doesn’t come to a halt. We have a stop-and-go light system, signs telling us when to yield or stop entirely and occasionally, we even put folks in blue uniforms on the streets to keep one thing happening: a constant and efficient flow of traffic that ensures everyone gets to their destination.
And just as you’d like to get to work on time, your kids to soccer practice or your pregnant wife to the hospital at 2:27 AM, ensuring your email messages arrive on time relies on the same type of trafficking system, albeit without the dudes in uniform.
Why Email Delivery Congestion Happens
Any intelligent outbound email delivery system understands the analogy, and as such, is set up to ensure the proper cadence is set to the delivery of email to its desired destination.
Everyone understands that internet service providers (ISPs) have had it rough for many years now. Spammers hammering their networks with illegitimate mail have taxed their systems and their workforce as they try to keep the bad stuff out while letting the good stuff in. To combat this, ISPs often limit the amount of email that is allowed through their network at any given time. These limitations make it more challenging for legitimate senders to get mail into the inbox.
And to complicate matters, they may change their acceptance policy at any time.
What senders of email need is an intelligent and responsible way of listening to receiving ISPs during the message delivery process and then adjusting (or throttling) message delivery based on feedback. This ebb and flow is what we like to call message cadence. And just as traffic can get congested on one side of town, it may be flowing freely on the other, so do different ISPs at different times allow you to move messages through at a higher rate of delivery. Needless to say, a mature understanding of ISPs around the globe is critical.
And just like ignoring traffic signals can put you in hot water, attempt to plow messages through an ISP using the same philosophy and watch how fast you’re stopped. Do it often enough and you’ll create a permanent record for your sending IPs, possibly losing the ability to deliver to an ISP altogether.
Intelligent email delivery helps route traffic and deliver mail successfully
This cadence, or message throttling, is all about thoughtful delivery and is an innovative feature of SendLabs SmartMTA. It ensure emails are being delivered at an optimal rate, at all times and without you having to worry about it. Changes in ISP policy happen, but SmartMTA is always listening and dynamically adjusts to each ISP across the globe on your behalf. This ensures senders stay off blocklists and receive higher throughput and deliverability.
In the early days of email, trust was given to senders automatically by ISPs. In today’s environment, however, it has to be earned. Most ISPs today manage their email servers and combat spam by limiting unknown sources access to their network. This is accomplished through a variety of methods like limiting the message per hour rate, greylisting or establishing user complaint thresholds via the spam/junk button found in the UI of many email clients. These tactics that ISPs have set for email deliverability into their networks have made it increasingly difficult for legitimate bulk (and sometimes transactional) email to successfully reach their customer’s inbox.
To this end, an extremely robust solution is needed to ensure that emails are delivered in a timely fashion. It’s in this environment that SmartMTA and the team at Dyn excels. With SmartMTA, global and individual settings are configured, optimized and monitored to help deliver streams of mail in an intelligent fashion for our customers, making both the ISPs and our customers very happy. Of course, there will still be instances where email gets de-prioritized by the ISP, resulting in slower delivery and error messages. In this event, SmartMTA excels too as it can dynamically adjust to the situation and establish a new cadence to increase throughput.
Don’t forget the human factor
And finally, any outbound SMTP service is not complete without a team of professionals who eat, sleep and breathe email delivery. Challenges will arise. ISPs will make changes. But at the end of the day, system admins at ISPs have families too. They’re good people who have a simple goal: to ensure that mail is a positive experience for their subscribers. They want mail to make it into the inbox and we like working closely with them to help make that happen.
For over 10 years, a focus on relationships with our customers has been a large part of our secret sauce. Uptime is the bottom line and our customers view us as confidants and colleagues with a mutual admiration for rock-solid solutions and reliability. Working together with you, Dyn delivers a rock-solid infrastructure to your organization, helping you cut costs and not only keep your web sites and applications up, but help you get more mail into the inbox.
SmartMTA is a solution specifically designed to manage an increasingly complex delivery landscape. Contact us and see for yourself how it can help you better get email delivered by connecting with us.
Josh Nason.com 