INDUSTRY: Email Services Provider

An email service provider supporting some of the world's largest, most demanding email marketers. 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.

The escalating volumes of spam, phishing and spoofing have led ISPs to take aggressive countermeasures to block unwanted email generated by illegal senders, making it increasingly expensive and difficult for legitimate senders to get email into prospect and customer inboxes.

Download Case Study

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."

In late 2005, Puresend replaced its email appliances with Momentum™ 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 Momentum's IP segmentation configuration tool," said Seltzer.

• 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 ncreasingly 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.

• Automatic failover ensures business continuity and high service levels
  "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.

• Open environment provides opportunities to enhance performance and reduce IT costs
  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 Momentums's processing speed and through consultation with Message Systems, we have identified how to reallocate our hardware dollars for the greatest impact," said Seltzer.

The Bottom Line: Reduced Email Servers by Two Thirds

Puresend handles thousands of inbound connections per second coming from 10 servers and hitting a cluster of three mail servers that can assign several hundred IPs in a matter of seconds. As Momentum 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.