Looking for dashboards for managing email logs

Casestudy 14west
"Finally a dashboard that is really geared towards those in the deliverability industry and that is able to manage my email logs."

Case studie with: the director, Deliverability at 14 West


14 West is the business services arm of The Agora, a network of more than 30 of the world's most innovative media companies.
By relying on 14 West, The Agora companies enjoy the unique luxury of focusing on the work they want to do, not the work they have to do.

One of 14 West’s 'Tech Solutions' is email delivery. Every year, 14 West sends more than 12 billion emails through The Agora network. 14 West uses six Momentum MTAs to process this volume and has approximately 150 sending IPs and 115 sending domains in use. Email is a key business driver for the Agora Network. The majority of customer interactions are facilitated via email.

14 West had a long wish list of (recognizable) requirements

  • The ability to stream 1.3 billion MX logs into an application and get a dashboard of what is going on in our email delivery system.
  • The ability to look at client, lists, and possibly at individual mailings, IP, sending domain, date range, time etc.
  • See delivery information that is happening as close to real time as possible. Delivery information such as successful deliveries, bounces, bounce
    catégorisations (hard vs soft), temp bounces and their reasons.
  • To go back in time and look for aggregate data. So, how many emails did client A send in a certain time frame, how many were delivered, bounced etc.
  • What is happening at the ISP level. How many emails is client B getting through via Gmail on this date, at this time, from this IP.
  • To be able to send FBLs into the system too, but since these are not MX log data, I understand if they are not included.
  • What would be really cool is if we can drill down and see the actual logs without having to have log server access.

The solution: Postmastery Delivery Analytics (PDA)

PDA is built for and built by email deliverability experts. This means that all the requirements are standard features of the PDA solution without exception. Even the FBLs are visible.

The integration of Delivery Analytics into the MTA was simple: Postmastery's standard Momentum/ SparkPost integration component was up and running in just a few seconds, shortly after which it was running locally on the Momentum server. It consumes more than 1,000,000 messages per minute in near real time. And before sending the data to Delivery Analytics, all email addresses in the log are fully anonymised to stay in sync with security and GDPR guidelines.

The result: 14 West is very happy!

The entire 14 West deliverability team has used Postmastery's Delivery analytics for over 12 months now. And they are very happy!

The main advantages identified to date are:

  • The ability to detect trends and avoid delivery issues given the 100% access to 90 days of MX logs.
  • Over the last 12 months, the number of escalated delivery issues were reduced significantly.
  • A significant increase in the productivity of the team. That part of the regular deliverability work can be done by less experienced people.
  • During holidays, sudden extra workloads or unforeseen absences, 14 West can upscale to external (Postmastery:-) delivery consultants at short notice simply by giving them access to the PDA interface.

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