Smartprofile | PowerMTA implementation and deliverability monitoring
"Choosing PowerMTA, with Postmastery's Console & support, allowed us to industrialise and strengthen our entire email infrastructure while keeping full control over the chain."
Case study with: Hervé Baïle
CTO and co-founder of Smartprofile
About Smartprofile
Smartprofile is a Data Marketing platform that collects and consolidates customer data from multiple sources, enabling cross-channel activation. Email is one of the platform's core channels, alongside other activation levers. Co-founded by Hervé Baïle (CTO), who has led its development since 2004, the company has built its offering around data architecture, operational reliability, and email-sending systems.
Beyond email, the platform natively offers a wide range of modules -web & mobile analytics, CDP management, distributed marketing, automation- and serves clients across diverse sectors: media, banking and insurance, services, industry, retail, and public administration.
Among its outbound flows, email is the primary channel: the platform delivered more than 150 million messages in 2025 on behalf of close to 200 clients.
The starting point
In early 2021, Smartprofile recognised that its platform needed to take a step up. The company's email flows -marketing, transactional, and institutional- each came with different requirements in terms of reliability, control, visibility, and cost. Mailbox provider standards and expectations were evolving rapidly, and the platform had to keep pace.
Hervé Baïle and his teams launched a thorough review with a clear question: how to equip Smartprofile with a sending infrastructure that matches its ambitions, capable of scaling while ensuring high deliverability across all flows?
Choosing a dedicated MTA
To frame this strategic project, Smartprofile relied on Postmastery's external expertise. Together, the teams reviewed available solutions in light of identified needs: existing platform, established processes, and strong requirements around operational control.
PowerMTA quickly emerged as the reference solution matching the requirements. Beyond the technical choice, the decision also shaped internal processes, monitoring, and the way operations are organised.
Integrating PowerMTA into the Smartprofile stack
PowerMTA was integrated at the core of Smartprofile's sending infrastructure, both in the outbound flow and in the feedback loop. The resulting architecture connects the email generation engine, PowerMTA, the feedback processing layer, and the mailbox providers into a unified circuit, giving Smartprofile end-to-end visibility on its sends.
The project required joint work on infrastructure and on the application layer: PowerMTA installation and configuration, updates to the email generation engine, back-office adjustments, and integration of synchronous and asynchronous feedback handling - a capability that was not available before this implementation.
Real-time visibility through the Postmastery Console
In addition to the MTA and the consulting service, Smartprofile relies on the Postmastery Console to manage deliverability on a daily basis. The Console provides the team with real-time visibility on sending performance and an operational alerting system.
In practice, the Console alerts Smartprofile's team on three key categories of events: changes in client-side DNS configuration, blocks or delays from specific mailbox providers, and IP blacklistings. Near real-time detection allows Smartprofile to be highly responsive to its own clients and their requests, before issues have a chance to settle in.
Project timeline
The project ran for about a year, from initial assessment to production rollout:
- Early 2022: Assessment and design phase: architecture choices, analysis of operational constraints, definition of the target model.
- June 2022: Infrastructure and platform work: PowerMTA installation, sending engine updates, back-office adjustments, feedback integration.
- November 2022: Validation and go-live: end-to-end testing, production checks, progressive rollout.
- December 2022: Operational readiness: monitoring, exploitation procedures, support model, and pilot test on a first client before broader deployment.
- January 2023:Full production across the entire client base.
- 2023 to now:ongoing deliverabilty monitoring and tuning.
Results
The benefits show up at two levels: in team efficiency, and in overall platform performance.
On the team side: a major gain in autonomy
Previously, a dedicated person had to dig into log files across several servers to handle specific deliverability requests. With PowerMTA's back-office combined with the Postmastery Console, incident analysis and resolution as well as daily deliverability follow-up have moved from around 3 hours to 30 minutes on average.
On the platform side: industrialised deliverability
Before PowerMTA, several limitations constrained day-to-day operations: asynchronous bounces could not be processed properly, TLS connection handling was limited, and reposts in cases of greylisting or delaying were managed almost manually through file copies.
Today, PowerMTA automatically handles message submission pacing based on destination domains and real-time feedback. Bounces, FBLs, and complaints are processed in a fully automated way, where several hours per week were previously required.
Granular control of IP allocation across virtual pools also makes IP warming and onboarding of new clients much smoother, and provides better leverage when responding to occasional blocks or incidents.
A client case in figures
On one specific client, between 2022 and 2025, Smartprofile increased the volume of routed emails by +5 million while bringing the bounce rate down from 0.2% to 0.04% - a fivefold reduction.
"Solid preparation, the right tools, and the right expertise made this implementation more reliable and easier to operate day to day. Choosing PowerMTA, with Postmastery's Console & support, allowed us to industrialise and strengthen our entire email infrastructure while keeping full control over the chain."
| Hervé Baïle, CTO & co-founder of Smartprofile
About Postmastery
Postmastery helps legitimate senders be recognised as trusted senders and reach the inbox. Our client base includes email service providers (ESPs), marketing agencies, and demanding professional senders. Postmastery is a global partner of leading MTA vendors - PowerMTA, GreenArrow, Halon, KumoMTA, Postfix - and offers integration services, local support, and deliverability optimisation.