2010/01/01 by Maarten Oelering.
Email relay solution for 1-2-1 Marketing
If you are a sender providing email relay services, how do you make sure that bounces and complaints are properly handled? Often the emails are generated by applications that hand-off the delivery to a relay service but have no means for processing returning bounces. This was also a question at 1-2-1 Marketing, a Texas based marketing agency that provides marketing services to hundreds of golf clubs.
Before 1-2-1 Marketing turned to us, they were already using PowerMTA to deliver transactional and marketing email from golf courses. The golf courses use a specific software solution for making tee time reservations and send email campaigns to their members. All email from the reservation software was submitted directly to the PowerMTA using SMTP.
To improve the deliverability we decided that bounce processing and complaint feedback loops needed to be implemented. Due to migration of email addresses and other causes bounce rates had risen to dangerous numbers. But adding bounce management in the golf course software running at over hundred sites was not an option. The solution was to suppress email to invalid addresses and complainers in the email relay service.
PowerMTA is able to process synchronous bounces, asynchonous bounces and complaint reports from feedback loops. Information from bounces and complaints is provided in a CSV based log file. To implement efficient suppression using a large list of addresses we choose to implement Exim in front of PowerMTA. This “back to back” configuration combines the strong filtering functionality of Exim with the strong delivery functionality of PowerMTA.
The new email relay solution uses address rewriting and header insertion to make sure that bounces and complaints can be processed properly. Information from bounces and complaints is periodically processed by scripts and transformed into a sender specific suppression database with a fast binary tree index. This resulted in a “worry free” solution for the users of the email relay service.
More information?
If you would like to know more about how we can help you solve delivery issues, just send us a message via our contact page.