• home
• customer login
• contact

• company

  company

  • introduction
  • executive team
  • careers

• delivery manager

  delivery manager

  • overview
  • benefits
  • features
  • specifications
  • ISP relations

• edge of network

  edge of network

  • overview
  • benefits
  • features
  • specifications

• press room

  press room

  • news
  • events
  • affiliations
  • customer profiles
  • white papers
  • brochures

• partners

  partners

  • programs
  • partner FAQs
  • partners list

Customer Profile

Puresend Pushes the Envelope with Message Systems

Puresend delivers email campaigns for some of the world's largest, most demanding email marketers, yet maintains a relatively low profile in the email industry. The Web-based email service provider's (ESP) growth comes primarily from referrals of satisfied customers who appreciate the company's focus on the constant improvement of its email deployment solutions and the superior value and quality it provides. Puresend's years of in-market performance and continuous product improvement, custom attention to changing user needs, and 24x7 monitoring and support has driven the ESP's growth. Today, Puresend has the capacity to send in excess of one billion email messages per month.

Unlike many ESPs, Puresend owns and controls its hardware infrastructure and data centers, and has forged favorable delivery partnerships, which have grown with the business. "At the heart, we're a technology company in the email space," said Cliff Seltzer, CEO of Puresend. "Our technology is our most important asset and our advantage is our ability to enhance our application based on industry changes and customer requirements."

The need for constant improvement

The escalating volumes of spam, phishing and spoofing have led ISPs to take aggressive countermeasures to block unwanted email generated by illegal senders. While necessary, this ever-evolving environment makes it increasingly expensive and difficult for legitimate senders to get email into prospect and customer inboxes. ESPs must develop sound strategies to keep pace with the ISPs' changing requirements on how they want to manage mail in order to ensure their clients' legitimate mail is delivered.

"As a medium to large volume ESP, it's our job to efficiently and reliably deliver our clients' email to the intended inboxes and to implement client requests for new capabilities," said Seltzer.

Puresend's original email delivery platform-an email appliance-limited the ESP's ability to keep pace with performance and service level goals. "While the appliance worked well enough in the beginning, we became frustrated with the fact that there was little we could to do bolster capacity and performance resulting from our success, short of adding more boxes," said Seltzer. "The other problem was that when one of the appliances failed during a campaign, our client's mail was stalled until the email platform vendor could resolve the problem, or we manually moved the load to another email server. Every failure was a fire drill and a potentially difficult customer conversation.

"For us, it was important to work with a partner that not only provides extremely competent solutions, but that also shares our philosophy that responding quickly to our clients' needs is paramount," said Seltzer. "Message Systems delivers that and more."

Pushing the Envelope

In late 2005, Puresend replaced it email appliances with Message Systems Delivery Manager to gain the flexibility to use their technology expertise to meet any challenge that its marketer clients send its way, and to respond to changing ISP requirements.

"After a rigorous evaluation of several possible solutions, we determined that Message Systems' high-performance email solution was the right one for us," said Seltzer. "It provides a powerful and flexible framework that allows our technologists to plug in the components they need to respond to our clients' specialized requests in a matter of minutes without affecting their existing systems."

An immediate benefit of using Message Systems for Puresend was the ability to control throttling by receiver, which helps our clients maintain their reputation by not overburdening the ISPs. "The granularity with which we can apply throttling is important to our business," said Alex Naro, Puresend's Director of Operations. "We can adjust throttling by client or by domain to match any ISP's requirements to ensure deliverability."

Puresend also takes advantage of Message Systems IP segmentation to provide dedicated unique IP addresses or sets of IP addresses to its customers as part of its service package at no additional charge. "It is a big benefit for us to be able to provide IP addresses so easily using Delivery Manager's IP segmentation configuration tool," said Seltzer.

Puresend also automated the set-up of IPs, which reduced the time to set up new clients with custom environments by 75 percent. Puresend can now set its clients up in less than a day.

Puresend runs Delivery Manager on a Linux operating system, creating an open email delivery environment that has paid off in a big way. With Delivery Manager's modularity, Puresend's technology team gained the power to make modifications that would enable the system to process more mail faster. "By using an open operating system and with help from the Message Systems technical staff, who really know their product, we saved a lot time optimizing Delivery Manager for our requirements while efficiently processing bounces," said Seltzer.

Puresend challenges its email delivery system with the shear peak volume of mail the company handles. The number of logs generated, the number of bounces kept, and the amount of mail stored in retry is likely much larger than the typical installation or in test conditions. "Loads of this magnitude can potentially cause problems," said Naro. "Our application creates the mail and injects them into Delivery Manager. The throughput we get when injecting that mail is incredibly high due to the inner workings and coding of our proprietary application."

Puresend handles thousands of inbound connections per second coming from 10 servers and hitting a cluster of three Delivery Manager mail servers that can assign several hundred IPs in a matter of seconds. The application then logs the mail and determines which IP to send it out on. As the Delivery Manager MTA receives inbound mail from the Puresend application, it processes and sends it out for final delivery while simultaneously handling bounces, storing re-tries in queue and keeping a schedule for subsequent delivery, and handling replies. This process requires large amounts of memory and storage.

Working in an open environment, further allowed Puresend to choose its own hardware and optimize it to maximize delivery performance. Moving from an environment where a server was chosen primarily for its processing power, the company has shifted to servers with less processing power, but more memory and faster hard drives. "Because of Message Systems Delivery Manager's processing speed and through consultation with Message Systems, we have identified how to reallocate our hardware dollars for the greatest impact," said Seltzer.

Puresend's email infrastructure is currently comprised of two clusters each comprised of three Delivery Manager servers and a cluster manager, a configuration that has paid off in throughput, continuity of service, customer satisfaction and IT cost savings. With performance enhancements made by Message Systems for Puresend and later incorporated into Delivery Manager, each cluster is capable of handling up to 6,000 IPs or 2,000 per node. With its previous email system, the best Puresend could achieve was 300 IPs per node.

"There's a cost to running each server in terms of physical space, power costs and overall monitoring and management," Seltzer explained. "So, if you can do more with less, you'll have some real cost savings. We're clearly seeing the effects of this efficiency now that one server is doing the work of three."

Clustering provides Puresend with automatic failover, which translates to improved business continuity. Puresend uses Message Systems' central configuration capability to configure the clusters so that if a node goes down, another node in the cluster will automatically pick up the IPs and continue delivering email. Similarly, when the node is back up, its IPs immediately transfer back to it. This also contributes to overall customer satisfaction by providing a much higher service level. "With automatic failover, if a node goes down there's no panic," said Seltzer. "From my point of view, this is one of the biggest benefits we have realized since making the switch to Message Systems."

What's Next?

Today, Puresend is basking in the light of having achieved with Message Systems Delivery Manager what it set out to do. The system is working well: both server and new customer set-up and configuration is much easier and faster, the company's ability to react to a delivery problem is within Puresend's control, the ESP is handling the load, and we've seen an increase in our already high client satisfaction rates."

Seltzer said they plan to enhance their email infrastructure to move to a virtual environment and Message Systems is onboard with the plan. "The thing we like best about working with the Message Systems team is their willingness to work with us to blaze new trails on all fronts related to email delivery," said Seltzer. "Both companies are going in the same direction, we both have the same end game: to service our clients by properly and efficiently delivering their email campaigns into their recipient's inbox. Message Systems is at the forefront of industry changes and we can depend on them to keep us apprised of the most recent industry standards and best practices, while incorporating the necessary technical compliance requirements into their future Delivery Manager releases."