So, how does a sender select a high volume MTA for their emails? This important question I’ll answer in this article.

Technical and strategical factors influencing email deliverability

Deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to the recipient inbox, without hitting the spam or junk folder. Deliverability is affected by a combination of several factors both strategic and technical.

Strategic factors include for instance the type of content you are sending, list hygiene and sender reputation. Technical factors include sending limits, RFC and authentication compliance. Your email server provider or MTA platform should provide those to you to be compliant with the anti-spam and pass filters.

What problems does a high volume MTA solve?

Before focusing on how to select the right MTA and if you should go cloud or on-premises, let’s see the problems that a high performance MTA can solve.

Performance: a high-performance MTA is the best solution to send volumes of messages with high deliverability, high speed and low latency, while retaining full control of sending parameters. Besides, a dedicated MTA usually allows more detailed performance analysis via integrated reports and external analytic tools, and if well managed can lead to a higher level of reliability/availability.

Configurability: a high-performance MTA can usually be tuned all the way down to very specific configurations to separate and maximize the performance of different types of communication patterns for transactional emails, content emails (i.e. newsletters), promotional emails

You should be able to configure an MTA to behave the way that is most beneficial for your communication project, for example:

• Use multiple sending queues, to segregate the email traffic and to prioritize your most important emails
• Use multiple IP Pools, to ensure the timely sendings of the emails or to separate volumes with different reputations
• Enable the authentication of the sender (DKIM signatures, Standard DMARC, SPF Configuration), to ensure your reputation identity
• Configure throttling per domain, to comply with the provider imposed limits and optimize the number of messages delivered
• Enable a detailed bounce classification and real-time management of errors and feedback loops, for timely analysis of sendings problem and comply with anti-spam rules

Choosing an MTA solution

If you are going to evaluate MTA options, selecting the right solution is very important. There are not a lot of different vendors that offer a commercial MTA. Here some advice I could give you:

1. Be sure about performances and reliability of the vendor. Possibly ask for references from other clients or resellers. Be sure that the vendor has a good reputation and has been working in the industry for a long time. In summary, be sure that he knows what he is doing!
2. Require price and technical transparency. An on-premises solution could be more convenient in the long term, but you need to be able to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership.
3. Be sure that your vendor has a strong concern about privacy and data protection and is able to suggest you the best way to keep your data protected.
4. Select a partner that can provide your company with ongoing supported consultancy both at the beginning and during the life of your project.
5. Look at the features of the MTA software and select the solution that can assure you the best mix of options for your needs.
6. Try to plan for the future: where do you see your project in the next few years? Find out beforehand the limits of your solution and the hidden cost of the migration between providers or between on-premises and cloud solutions.

These are the different type of features you want to be looking for:

• outbound email authentication capability and monitoring (DKIM, DMARC, SPF);
• outbound antispam/antivirus/RBL monitoring;
• outbound connection/sending tuning (deliverability related features such as throttling, IP pools, connection pooling, connection limiting);
• inbound bounce/feedback elaboration and routing capabilities;
• multiple queue/priority sendings handling;
• ease of use (web/software management, statistics, message search, log/data integration);
• high-availabilty capabality (clustering);
• reliability, authentication and accountability (storage type, clustering, error handling, logging);
• installation format (software/virtual machine/appliance);
• API/integration capabilities.

Cloud, on-premises and hybrid MTAs

Being an ESP and MTA vendor, we notice a growing demand of on-premises solutions in all industries. Very structured companies need to refer to a strong vendor able to play in both fields.

Some clients need to internalize their email sending infrastructure. Because of factors such as business models, email volumes or security and privacy policies and evaluate hybrid solutions (e.g.: In-house ESP and outsource MTA components).

Hybrid is an interesting scenario for those companies that want to satisfy their needs for privacy, full data control, and high deliverability performance. Email vendors should quickly adapt their proposition to offer flexible and sustainable solutions to satisfy the specific needs of clients from all industries. More about the differences in the modern considerations about Cloud versus on-premises in my next article.

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You need to know the best type of MTA for your company. So, next to the features, should it be Cloud, On-premise or even Hybrid?

Choosing between a cloud and on-premises MTA

The comparison between cloud and on-premises for Mail Transfer Agent software has become like belief in one religion or another. Followers of “Cult A” keep producing data and theories that always come to the same business-driven conclusion: “all market trends are going towards this kind of solution”. Followers of “Cult B” instead focus on how easy-to-adopt solutions have little impact at the beginning but quickly become unmanageable in medium/long term.

Of course, we perfectly know that extremism is the opposite of rationality. Working in both cloud and on-premises solution markets allowed our company to have a more nuanced view on how the market is evolving. In 2016, after more than 15 years of experience in the market as ESP (MagNews is our email marketing platform), we decided to rebrand our MTA Solution.

EmailSuccess has been developed in-house 10 years ago, when both our customers and email volume were growing rapidly. We decided not to outsource this important component of our system. On top of the in-house usage (around 600 companies), the software was already used by all on-premises customers of our ESP solution.

Why should your company consider an on-premises MTA ?

In our experience the main reasons that drive the choice between a cloud and an on-premises solution are:

1. Security and privacy: for many companies data is important and for others, there are market regulator constraints upon choosing a technical solution that will inevitably store that data. In some cases, the only way to conform with regulators is to have the full control of the software and this is one of the main reasons why many companies opt for an on-premises solution.
2. Technical capabilities: MTAs are not complex solutions to install and configure, but they require a company able to manage the infrastructure. This is one of the main reasons why many companies opt for cloud.
3. Cost: typically depends on specific needs, but usually a (one-time) license fee of the on-premises solution is less expensive than many monthly or annually volume-based fees, with the warning of having a higher startup cost.

Big senders like ESPs, marketing automation services, big eCommerce, frequent notification services will always more inclined to buy an on-premises MTA for cost and configurability reasons. As the higher volume tips the scale towards more attractive cost model for on-premises and the bigger gains on the more granular configuration.

From 1 million email/month could be considered a good start volume to consider in-house MTA. However, it’s always difficult to talk about numbers as being too rigid, not seeing other aspects that might suggest a dedicated MTA solution. If a sender needs to generate different types of communication (transactional, newsletter, etc.), a solution with a dedicated MTA permits more control on for instance, the delivery time of a single type of email. If that is the sole reason, the volume can be lower.

Example of how a configuration interface might look

Aspects like “sensibility to data retention” and “in-house technical capabilities” play an important role in the decision to opt for an on-premise service in sectors like finance and healthcare.
On-premises can be the right choice when a company needs a high level of control of his sendings and of his data.

What about the evolution of the MTA market?

The MTA market is growing and is clearly moving towards the cloud, but for what we can see, cloud solutions do not take into account specific needs for data protection and privacy. Almost each year market regulators are imposing new constraints on managing personal data, and companies should be ready when this rules hit the general market. For example the new GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, for the EU that will become enforceable on 25 May 2018.

MTAs market have been also dealing with quite a few important changes recently, some players are evolving and other actors are emerging to provide alternatives. Companies should be ready to run new software selections to see if there’s something different to try.

Cloud, on-premise or… Hybrid MTA

Very structured companies need to refer to a strong vendor able to play in both cloud and on-premise.
Some clients need to internalize their email sending infrastructure. Because of factors such as business models, email volumes or security and privacy policies and evaluate hybrid solutions (e.g.: In-house ESP and outsource MTA components).

Hybrid is an interesting scenario for those companies that want to satisfy their needs for privacy, full data control, and high deliverability performance. Email vendors should quickly adapt their proposition to offer flexible and sustainable solutions to satisfy the specific needs of clients from all industries.

Last but not least, some interesting hybrid MTA solutions with only a portion of the marketing stack “in the cloud” are emerging. We daily have to do with this new kind of requests. Vendors should be ready to follow clients in adopting the right option.

Yes, it’s a quite interesting scenario, where performances and problem solving will make the difference (as well as economic competitiveness, of course).
What counts for users, is to work out objectives and capabilities before starting their MTA software selection and making a choice.

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