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Customer Profile

Goodmail Systems Meets Customer Deliverability Requirements with Message Systems

Founded in 2003 to provide a safe and reliable means for consumers to identify authentic messages from legitimate commercial and nonprofit senders, Goodmail Systems CertifiedEmailT rapidly evolved into the industry's standard class of trusted email. CertifiedEmail has been adopted by seven of the nation's top ten mailbox providers-including AOL, AT&T, Comcast, COX Communications, Road Runner, Verizon and Yahoo!- and 150 government agencies, and is supported in North America and the United Kingdom by a wide network of email platforms and service providers.

Reputable companies that want to meet strict standards for best email practices and low complaint rates, adopt Goodmail's CertifiedEmail to assure delivery of all opt-in email messages to the inbox with links and images intact. Each CertifiedEmail is sent with a cryptographically secure token that assures authenticity, and is marked in the inbox with a unique blue ribbon envelope icon, enabling consumers to distinguish messages visually that are real and sent from senders with whom they have a pre-existing relationship.

New Goodmail customers have the option of applying the CertifiedEmail token to their outbound email themselves by adopting an email delivery system that is Goodmail capable, or having Goodmail do it for them. Most new customers take advantage of Goodmail's Hosted Imprinted Services (HIS) to prove the value of using certified mail before taking the imprinting in-house. Some smaller customers-typically those sending fewer than 100,000 message a month-use HIS indefinitely. Goodmail HIS processes 100 million messages per month with volumes steadily increasing.

Meeting Customer Needs

Unlike most HIS customers that send smaller quantities of mail or use HIS for a brief time, one company, in particular, has been using Goodmail's Hosted Imprinted Services for several months and is responsible for a large percentage of the 100 million monthly messages. To ensure its mail reaches recipients in a timely manner, the company opens as many as 4,000 inbound connections simultaneously to deliver the mail to Goodmail where the CertifiedEmail token is imprinted. Goodmail needed a solution that had the ability to handle this large number of inbound connections, which it found in the Message Systems Delivery Manager.

Goodmail Systems had already formed a strategic partnership with Message Systems and had several Message Systems Delivery Manager MTAs in-house for porting and testing joint customers' email campaigns. "We had already observed good delivery performance on Message Systems Delivery Manager and we were familiar with its capabilities, so we decided to put it to work for our Hosted Imprinted Services," said Clement Sciammas, vice president of Operations for Goodmail Systems.

The implementation of Delivery Manager was complete in September 2007 with minimal training. "Since we were already familiar with Delivery Manager through our testing processes, we only needed a little training," said Sciammas. "The Message Systems support team has been very helpful in assisting us in using the more advanced features and has been extremely responsive when we have questions."

The Payoff

"The immediate benefit of using Message Systems Delivery Manager was that we didn't have to ask one of our largest customers to change their sending habits," said Sciammas. "With Message Systems, we can imprint the CertifiedEmail token and do the final delivery at the same rate we receive mail. We were also happy to learn that Delivery Manager not only handles thousands of inbound connections, but that the speed at which it processes email actually improves with additional connections."

In addition to solving the immediate customer-driven problem, Message Systems Delivery Manager benefits Goodmail Systems in other areas: hardware reduction, quick resolution of delivery issues and flexibility in handling inbound messages.

According to Sciammas, Goodmail reduced its hardware and maintenance costs with Delivery Manager. "We were able to reduce the number of servers by 40 percent and still handle the same volume of email messages with better performance," he said.

"There are a number of features in Message Systems Delivery Manager that provide us with a great amount of flexibility," said Sciammas. "Take troubleshooting, for example. Delivery Manager's logging capability is very customizable and is in a format that is very useful for debugging, which helps us solve delivery issues quickly."

Goodmail was having trouble generating tokens for certain types of email messages coming from one customer. Delivery Manager made it easy to pinpoint the cause of the problem. "Message Systems allows us to specify precisely what we want to see in the logs, which helps us identify the root cause of delivery problems quickly," said Sciammas.

Sciammas also finds Message Systems web interface useful. "Being able to view real-time statistics on performance and the behavior of the MTA lets us identify delivery issues as they happen and correct them before the customer notices them."

Message Systems also provides wide flexibility in how Goodmail handles inbound messages. "Messages that would come from a particular customer would have to have certain data embedded into the email as we were creating tokens," said Sciammas. "Based on multiple rules analyzing header information, we are able to distinguish what information should be embedded into the message. We now can quickly analyze the actual content of the message and then embed the appropriate information. This allows us-especially in the HIS environment-to have a number of customers that are supported with the same infrastructure." This capability makes it easier for Goodmail to manage the delivery process for all of its customers and it increases delivery performance because there is less configuration and processing that needs to occur while the messages are in transit.

What's Next?

With multiple Message Systems Delivery Manager servers running independently, Goodmail is planning to implement clustering to take advantage of automatic failover to ensure delivery continuity. Clustering will also make it easier and less costly to configure the servers and will aid in logging and metrics.

"We are considering using Delivery Manager's scripting capability in the future," said Sciammas. "Message Systems scripting language will allow us to manipulate messages based on receiving and sending criteria, providing a great degree of flexibility in handling messages during the transit process."

Message Systems has been a win for Goodmail Systems and its customers. "Message Systems Delivery Manager truly meets our needs," said Sciammas. "It has given us flexibility and performance while minimizing the hardware we need, which in turn, decreases the amount of the support overhead and configuration associated with the volumes we have now and expect in the future."