Freshmail chooses MailerQ

Published on May 15, 2018 | By MailerQ

Freshmail - the Polish leading ESP - recently decided to move their entire sending operations over to MailerQ. We asked their CTO Wojtek Ptak how he has experienced that move and what he expects from it in the future.

What was your situation before you migrated to MailerQ and why did you decide to make the move?

FreshMail used a sending infrastructure based on a custom solution. The key part of this solution was a large network of Postfix senders extended with a large number of custom modules. Our sending engine (part which was responsible for the preparation and the execution of message sending) was also a custom solution.

There were several pitfalls which we came across while reviewing our infrastructure against current and future requirements. Among those there were:

• Postfix is not designed to handle high volumes of delivering high volumes of messages by its very definition, so it requires a lot of additional work around it
• It doesn’t provide any support – we needed to support it in-house
• High cost of the Postfix hardware infrastructure (high-end servers requiring very fast SSD drives) and its maintenance
• Limitations of such solutions in terms of deliverability compliance, like: IP or domain speed throttling, flood patterns, ability to respond to ISPs feedback in a real time and others
• Development and maintenance of a very complex solution on our own
• And others

In 2017 we started our new project, focusing on increasing deliverability. It’s important to factor in that the rules of the ESPs market are changing rapidly. There are lots of threats which we need to defend our customers and ourselves against. ISPs are building more and more sophisticated solutions, which we need to comply with. All of that requires one key ingredient - we need to be able to analyze and tune the sending engine using very high rates real time analytics and machine learning.

After reviewing our options carefully, having our scale in mind, we decided it’s much better decision to use a professional MTA solution with a new sending engine backed up by a new big data cluster.

How did you experience the migration and the help of the MailerQ team?

One word - great. Every solution is different and requires a personalized approach. That’s what we get from the MailerQ team. They’re very open, collaborative and helpful. We where assisted at every time we needed help.

What do you expect is the long-term effect of the migration to MailerQ on your day-to-day operations?

As described above, we are rebuilding our engine to gain competitive advantage and prepare the engine which we can use to grow our business further. It’s at the very base of our operations.

We want our new solution to be really fast, very responsive and secure for our customers and ourselves. We’re using the top technologies we can get. MailerQ is one of the key ingredients of it. It allows us to send much higher volumes at a lower price, be more compliant with ISPs requirements, and by being able to generate high volumes of a very detailed feedback - protect out network. All of that enabled us to work on new offerings for our customers.

Do you have any advice for anybody thinking about making the move?

The way you can go really depends on the nature of your business, your scale and business specific requirements.

If you’re in a situation like ours – being a large-scale ESP - then start from the very beginning. Sending messages is the very heart of our business. Review your business plans and roadmaps. You need to make sure you understand the long-term product goals very well. Be prepared to challenge your status quo on the highest levels. Choices you make will affect your whole business operations. Then make sure to invest in understanding the market situation – from ISPs compliance, deliverability good practices, competitive ESPs solutions and do a research on tools you can use. In our case it wasn’t about the MTA alone – it was about rethinking how our heart operates. This will take time and resources but also requires engagement of the highest personnel.

When choosing a new MTA there are multiple options you can choose from. Some of these solutions are well established on the market, having great reputation as a tool. However – please, bear in mind everything what you need from such solution. Not only the reputation itself, but also experience of the vendor, their support and also its roadmap of the product and vendor’s ability to execute it. After carefully selecting our options as described above we decided to go for MailerQ.