The following is written by Juan Altmayer Pizzorno, the original author of PowerMTA. Pizzorno has been developing email server software for over 25 years and currently serves as Sr. VP of Research & Development at SparkPost. He co-founded and was CTO of Port25 Solutions.

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With the recent Mandrill announcement, there’s been a lot of coverage of SparkPost in the industry lately. While this has been a great time for the company as a whole, I want to give you an update on Port25, as things here are going very well.

When the acquisition of Port25 by Message Systems (now SparkPost) was announced, there was a great deal of fear for the future of our company—and more importantly—what it meant for the loyal users of our PowerMTA product. But as they say, “the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated”. Now a year later, it seems like a good time to let you all in on how the integration went and to lay those fears to rest.

The initial transition was swift but went impressively smoothly. We moved to the SparkPost offices, met our new colleagues and found that the corporate culture wasn’t all that different from our own. Even our LAN’s IP addresses fit in nicely. Sure, our old offices were quieter, but along with the noise came additional email technology experts to collaborate with, not to mention the added support of company resources like IT and HR.

Despite these changes, the most important things remained consistent. I continue to lead the very same PowerMTA/PMC team, and we’re even looking to hire an additional engineer to expand the team (Know any great engineers? We’d love to meet them). We continue to work in the same manner as before, setting our goals, writing code test-first, and doing our daily scrum meetings.

Work on PowerMTA and the PMC also continues normally. We released v4.5 / v1.5 last year followed by a few micro-releases since. The next update (spoiler alert!) should include MX-based queue roll-ups and SMTPUTF8 support. I’m excited to finally launch the MX-based roll-ups, as I remember thinking about this some 17 years ago, before Port25 was even founded. There are other cool features we’re working on, but I don’t want to get too much ahead of myself. We’re also taking advantage of the new resources and team to train additional support engineers on PowerMTA, providing wider coverage to Port25 customers.

As PowerMTA’s original author, I’d love for it to enjoy a long life, and I can say today that SparkPost feels like a good home for it.