Deliverability & monitoring Postfix Logs

 

"The Postmastery Console is really the tool dedicated to emailing that allows us to get the best reading of our Postfix logs in real time."

Case study with: Gilles Marchault,
Email Product Manager at CCM Benchmark Group


At Postmastery, we frequently discuss our services and tools with our clients to make sure we stay 100% in sync with their needs. In this case study, we share a talk with Gilles Marchault, Email Product Manager at CCM Benchmark Group in France. The main topic is the Postmastery Console and how this tool helps him maintain and optimise email deliverability and their Postfix MTA.

1/ Could you please describe CCM Benchmark and your activities related to email?

CCM Benchmark Group publishes a lot of websites including CCM / Comment ça Marche, Linternaute.com, Journal des Femmes, Journal du Net, Hugo L'Escargot, Copains d'Avant, Viadeo. We send around a billion emails every year. All these mailings are divided between the editorial newsletters of our sites and the transactionel emails to the various services that we can offer. We have always used Postfix mail server as an MTA to carry out our mailings.

2/ Could you please describe your initial needs/ challenges regarding deliverability management?

We have a relatively small number of IPs (less than 70) distributed by pool according to the different sites. However, we did not have a central monitoring tool with an alert system to inform us quickly in the event of an anomaly so that we could take action. Further, some of the tools we were using were not email oriented and gave us a lot of work. Our transactional emails did not go through our platform which was linked to editorial newsletters so we had a limited overview of this part of our activities.

3/ Could you please tell us how the Postmastery Console/ Postmastery's consultancy services assisted you with deliverability management?

The Postmastery Console allowed us to better process our Postfix logs in real time and therefore to better analyse our issues. We were thus able to review our priorities to focus on our real needs and not on our false issues. The major plus points are the 30 day history, the option of exporting all the elements in CSV and, in particular, the filtering capacity which allows us to analyse any anomalies that may arise. What we lack today are the ability to customise alerts, to have alerting on deferred and to be able to manage different levels of access to data depending on who connects.

4/ Could you please share a few before/ after metrics related to your email deliverability and results in terms of delivery performance, efficiency etc.?

What we see most is that we can identify operator blockages and, above all, analyse the causes much more quickly. This generally allows us to have more rapid exchanges with ISPs and to provide them information on false positives so that we can obtain releases quickly. Above all, we can now identify the single IP within a whole dedicated pool which is encountering anomalies. We then know if we need to temporarily remove an IP so that it does not slow down the sending of news.


If you like to talk further about this topic, or need general information.