UK-based email marketing solutions provider Forfront is a private company that serves over 1000 users sending 120 million emails per month. The users of their platform are primarily B2B. However, 30% of their target audience is consumers. With peak volumes of up to 1.1 million messages per hour, Forfront needed an agile and flexible SMTP server solution to handle its growing message volume. They required more email stream control during heavy send periods to reduce their bounce rate dramatically. They also required more detailed bounce classification within their bounce log to process true hard bounces (bad addresses that should be extracted from the send database) from soft bounces (temporary delivery failures that can be resolved).

Forfront Delivery Challenges

“With PowerMTA™ in our arsenal, we can reliably send the amount of emails our clients expect from us as an ESP. Its ease of use and powerful controls help us grow as a company with the assurance that PowerMTA™ will keep pace.”Before their move to PowerMTA™, Forfront relied on email marketing software from StrongMail. As Forfront’s client base expanded, the company grappled with a growing and poorly managed bounce logging system. Optimizing bounce log management is a crucial building block for maintaining a stellar IP reputation. The lack of detailed categorization of bounces with their old MTA software was a pain point for Forfront, as it was challenged to identify which bounced emails should be extricated from their send lists correctly. In addition, the propensity of granular configurations required to distribute large numbers of emails were becoming resource prohibitive. Forfront exercised due diligence with StrongMail (now StrongView) and other MTAs, but didn’t find a product that would give them the specified bounce strings they required to isolate true “hard bounces” that should be extracted from soft bounces masquerading as hard bounces.

The Solution

Forfront required a pragmatic approach and switched to PowerMTA™, which has close to 20 unique ISP diagnostic bounce codes built in the PowerMTA toolbox, allowing them to effortlessly distinguish true hard bounces from soft bounces that show up as 5.X.X, thereby optimizing their clients’ send lists. PowerMTA’s feedback loop processes and bounce log filtering optimized Forfront’s processing servers, liberating additional resources for queuing and sending email. With the agility to throttle at the domain level, Forfront now ensures timely delivery for their growing client base to the inbox. The granular level of bounce classifications available from PowerMTA™ provides Forfront with a powerful tool for working with large clients. PowerMTA™ gives high volume clients better delivery rates for email campaigns, leading to greater client satisfaction.

PowerMTA from Port25 Solutions, Inc. is recognized in over 50 countries, with over 4000 installations worldwide. Port25’s global footprint exceeds well over 130 Email Service Providers and cloud based marketing automation companies including 70% of the leading ESPs. As of May 2014 we’ve begun to see traction for email infrastructure in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and the UAE. PowerMTA can be evaluated here.