Empowering a Proactive Approach to Deliverability Management

The post below comes from guest contributor Barry Abel, VP of Field Operations at Message Systems.

Earlier in May I posted here about the changing nature of delivery technology solutions, and outlined what I see as the drawbacks of conventional approaches such as traffic shaping. In this post I’m going to talk about new approaches to delivery optimization, and provide a description of Message Systems Adaptive Delivery technology. The product has been commercially available for more than a year now, but we’ve been perfecting it and relaunched it recently with some upgraded features and capabilities.

Readers of this blog aren’t interested in a sales pitch, obviously. But I think Adaptive Delivery is a newsworthy topic, especially for readers of Deliverability.com, because it’s designed to empower a proactive approach to deliverability management, rather than the largely reactive technologies and techniques we’ve all relied on for so long. So I’ll keep this brief.

The basic function of Adaptive Delivery: it automatically monitors and tunes your delivery parameters based on email disposition results as they occur in order to optimize deliverability, safeguard/repair reputation and improve overall efficiency. It does this through a variety of techniques, but I’d like to focus on two key ones.

First, Adaptive Delivery supports granular mail stream segregation, so you can segment and manage outbound email by any number of variables, such as type of mail, client or business unit, customer segment, domain/sub-domain, etc. Second, Adaptive Delivery captures, interprets and acts on disposition data in real time to proactively manage delivery based on that segregation. This is what allows for auto-tuning of your delivery parameters to adjust sending and retry rates, or suspend deployment in the case of rolling blocks. And you get a ping whenever issues arise that require immediate attention. With this release, the rules are now continually refreshed and can be configured to your environment too.

Also new with this release of Adaptive Delivery is a powerful capability called “smart threshold management.” It addresses two of the most critical yet challenging conditions to manage: 1) spam (feedback loop) complaints and 2) hard bounces, such as invalid recipient/unknown user. This lets you suspend or throttle down traffic for different threshold levels in each of your mail streams – automatically and in real time. The feature can help you detect and act on potential security breaches as well.

By allowing smart technology do what smart technology can do, we believe that Adaptive Delivery is a game changer. But it’s not just the real-world deliverability and reputation improvements we’re seeing that have us excited. It’s also the feedback we’re getting from deliverability professionals in the field on how Adaptive Delivery helps them do their jobs more effectively, makes their lives easier and enables them to focus on other priorities, such as providing advice for practice improvement. I hope to be able to share more news on this front soon.

Last 5 posts by deliverability

• Is "Deliverability" just another (Silly) Buzzword? - May 3rd, 2012
• Looking Back on 2011: Our 5 Top Posts - January 9th, 2012
• Start Thinking Like an ISP - November 21st, 2011
• Best Practices/Standards - March 25th, 2011