At Elastic Email, we built our own Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to send your emails. What does that mean for you? In short, it means that we can provide you with better, more reliable service. How? Let’s get right to that.
Table of contents
- What is a Mail Transfer Agent?
- How does having our own MTA help your deliverability?
- What about the bottom line?
- Conclusion
What is a Mail Transfer Agent?
A Mail Transfer Agent is a piece of software that relays emails between computers using SMTP. Essentially, it’s a traffic management system for your email, ensuring that it gets from point A (the sending client) to point B (the receiving client). While some Email Service Providers use third-party MTAs, we have our own MTA built from the ground up. How does it work?
IP Warmups
Inbox providers take IP reliability into account. This means that a new IP sending a lot of emails will trigger some red flags and have your emails classified as spam, or bounced. MTAs are programmed to overcome this issue by slowly increasing sending volume from certain IPs and mixing them in with reputable IPs.
Email Throttling
Sending too many emails at once might result in lower deliverability. With 10 years of experience, our Mail Transfer Agent is well-tuned to deliver as many emails as possible without triggering various inbox limits.
DKIM
Domain Key Identification Mail is a method of authentication, wherein records set in the sender domain confirm the domain’s authenticity to reduce email spoofing. DKIM records help deliverability and security.
How does having our own MTA help your deliverability?
Our Mail Transfer Agent allows us to have full control over the email sending process. This means that all our IPs are managed by our software, which allows us to warm up IPs, throttle the emails as to not overload the receiving servers, and route the emails to ensure the highest possible deliverability.
We’ve been able to design and build unique features such as routing mail for more engaged contacts on specific IPs while routing less engaged contacts to others. This tool helps remediate old lists and improve delivery metrics.
Our own MTA also makes it easier for us to solve any deliverability and technical issues that may arise when you send your emails in a timely manner. Not relying on a third party to handle the MTA part of our process means we’re always in control of what’s going on with your emails.
What about the bottom line? ($$)
The other big advantage of having our own Mail Transfer Agent is that we don’t have to pay anyone else to send your emails. Elastic Email really sends your mail - right down to the protocol level. We have built an extremely efficient system that sends on bare metal servers. This means big cost savings that we pass directly onto you, our clients.
Conclusion
Our MTA will help you ensure that your emails will arrive in your recipients’ inboxes reliably, and without issue for lower cost. Choosing us over companies that do not use their own MTAs ensures that your needs will be met quicker, better and cheaper.
Want to see how it works in practice? Try Elastic Email for Free now!
Adam Kościelak
Adam Kościelak is an experienced writer and video content creator. Throughout 2021, he worked as Elastic Email's Content Specialist, expanding our content library.
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