PowerMTA provides the unique features and capabilities required by email service providers and enterprises to maximize the effectiveness of email marketing and customer communications, and to maintain their standing as senders of legitimate mail.

Authentication Tools

Sender authentication standards are a critical building block for this generation of email.

To ensure maximum delivery and to help separate legitimate email from fraud, senders should adopt specifications as quickly as possible. This task is difficult however because the specifications can be complex, there are several competing standards that are subject to change and different receivers will prefer alternative methods of authentication.

PowerMTA's authentication tools make it easy for senders to adopt the latest specifications and ensure on-going compliance by providing the following:

• Automated stamping and sending of messages as required by the Sender ID and DomainKeys specifications (including cryptographic signatures, header insertion and protocol extensions)
  
  
• "Guaranteed Authentic" mode - messages are verified for compliance with authentication specifications prior to delivery. Messages that fail the authentication check are removed from the queue and reported as failures.

• Certified Email compliance - PowerMTA, the first MTA certified by Goodmail System's for use with their CertifiedEmail service, assures delivery of senders' email campaigns to inboxes of subscribers of leading mailbox providers, including AOL and Yahoo!, by distinguishing approved emails from spam and indicating they are safe for your customers to open with a certification symbol.
  
  

For more tools and resources to assist with sender authentication, please visit our authentication resource center.

Segmentation & Classification

Accreditation services such as Habeas and Return Path provide legitimate senders a strong method by which they can distinguish their mailings from spam.

• Adopting these services, however, can be difficult because they require you to segment your email into classes and separate the delivery of your compliant email from non-compliant streams over different IP addresses. (For example, acquisition mailings may not meet an accreditation standard that your newsletter mailings meet. e.g. double opt-in)
  
  
• PowerMTA allows you to segment a single server into an unlimited number of "Virtual MTA's" and provides several methods for segmenting and routing mail to the appropriate "Virtual MTA". Each "Virtual MTA" may have its own IP address and delivery policy.
  
  
• Using these features, marketers can easily meet the classification requirements of Habeas and SenderScore Certified. PowerMTA also will automatically stamp each Habeas compliant message with the appropriate Habeas headers prior to delivery.
  
  
• Email service providers often use this feature to separate streams of email from different clients. This is essential for accountability and is frequently offered as a value-added service.

Delivery Policy Management

Responsible senders will apply appropriate delivery settings for each recipient domain based on the domain's published (and/or unpublished) spam policies. This is particularly relevant when delivering to large ISPs (e.g. AOL, MSN, Yahoo), each of whom has different preferences and optimal settings for parameters such as:

• Number of simultaneous connections
• Number of messages per connection
• Number of delivery attempts per hour (throttling)
• Retry period and bounce period
• Authentication method

PowerMTA allows you to define and apply delivery policies at various levels: globally, per recipient domain, per campaign, per client, per "Virtual MTA", etc.

The most recent version of PowerMTA allows for more granular delivery rate support down to an X messages per second basis.

The benefit of using delivery policies is that you can be a good neighbor by proactively complying with recipient spam policies. The result is improved deliverability and fewer reputation issues.

PowerMTA also gives you the ability to free up resources for high priority campaigns on demand via breaking connections of lower priority queues.

PowerMTA 3.5 includes a new IP address warm up feature to help build reputation on fresh IPs.

Reputation Monitoring

Sender reputation is quickly becoming the basis by which spam filters determine whether messages are delivered to your recipient's inbox. How your domain is perceived by ISP's, corporate administrators, and anti-spam companies has an increasingly direct impact on deliverability.

In this new world, senders need to continually monitor their reputations or risk being caught off guard by issues that could have a significant impact on their ability to communicate with their customers.

• PowerMTA is the first email gateway to offer real-time reputation monitoring.
  
  
• Using this feature, marketers, administrators and/or ISP relations personnel will be notified immediately if a recipient is blocking your messages due to a perceived issue with your domain.
  
  
• Once these issues are identified, PowerMTA can also stop delivering mail and/or apply a new delivery policy for remaining attempts.

The result is that you stay on top of your reputation and can intelligently respond to issues before they get worse.

Delivery Reporting

Delivery tracking and reporting is an essential input to your email marketing strategy and planning. PowerMTA performs detailed tracking of all delivery related statistics in its internal accounting database that can accessed through a variety of methods in real-time or batch mode:

• Command line statistics and analysis utility
• Web-based status monitoring
• Data export of statistics log (XML, CSV, HTML, etc.)
• API to statistics log (C, Java, Perl)

PowerMTA reports include delivery status summaries as well as categorized bounce reports. Statistics can also be retrieved on a "per job" or "Virtual MTA" basis so that you can analyze individual campaigns and assess the impact of different delivery policies, authentication methods and accreditation services on delivery.

Integration & Personalization

Customer messaging gateways invariably require integration with an originating system such as a CRM system or custom mail feeder application. To address your specific integration needs, PowerMTA supports a variety of message submission interfaces:

• Standard submission interface using SMTP
• File-based submission using pickup directory
• Proprietary submission interface through our API (C, C++, Java, Perl)
• Data exports from delivery log (XML, CSV, HTML, etc.)
• API to delivery log (C, Java, Perl)
• Forwarding of inbound messages to file or via local pipe

Creating personalized mailings is a must for effective email marketing.

• PowerMTA now includes a personalization engine that will perform mail merge just prior to delivery
  
  
• Using PowerMTA to personalize messages can significantly improve message throughput.
  
  
• All submission methods have been expanded to include definition of message templates, substitution rules and substitution data.

Power Queue

At the heart of PowerMTA is Power Queue, our proprietary message queuing and delivery engine. Power Queue is unique because it was designed from scratch to address the integration, throughput, control and tracking requirements of email marketing. Some of the specific advantages of Power Queue include:

• Delivers 10x more messages per hour than leading freeware alternatives and corporate mail systems
• Strict compliance with Internet email protocols
• Includes both outbound and inbound message processing

Configuration & Control

PowerMTA is easy to install and configure. Most users have it up and running in just a few minutes. Installation follows the common approaches used on each of the major platforms.

Configuration is managed through an administrator-friendly text file that comes pre-populated with an out-of-the-box configuration and offers extensive control options that tailor PowerMTA to your specific needs. A command-line management tool is also provided for interactive and scripted administration/operations.

Platforms & Packages

PowerMTA is delivered as downloadable software that runs on standard platforms on commodity hardware. The benefit to you is lower cost of operations, and it is easier to support and integrate with existing systems than proprietary appliance architectures. Supported platforms include:

• Microsoft Windows (2000/2003/XP, Intel)
• Linux (RedHat 8 or later, Fedora Core I & II, others upon request, Intel)
• Sun Solaris (Solaris 8 or later, SPARC)

PowerMTA is licensed on a straightforward, per server basis. There are two versions of the product: low capacity and high capacity. Customer can choose annual or perpetual licensing options.

As a commercial software provider, committed to your success as a commercial emailer, we offer responsive support services and timely software upgrades.

For configuration assistance and licensing details please request a quote from our sales organization.