New Enterprise eMail Server

The boys over at ActivSoftware have recently released a new enterprise level email server that can send out over 1,000,000 emails per hour and costs less than $6k to get started. They've got some unique features that their main competitor StrongMail doesn't even offer. The best part about their new email server is that they built it from scratch, that's right, from the ground up. It's java certified and totally tocks.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of RSS advertising and normally despise email as a main form of advertising... but at the same time I understand the importance of having a well-rounded and balanced campaign implementation.

Something else that's pretty important to note is that while Strongmail is their strongest competition, it also costs about 5x as much to set up and get running. Here a couple more features XM Mail Server has that the competition doesn't.

Realtime Bounce Management - XM Mail Server's bounce filter recognizes over 1,700 different bounce or delivery status messages. These messages might say user doesn't exist (this is a hard bounce), or mail box full (a soft bounce), or perhaps just a challenge response that requires you to enter a captcha code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha).

Some of the unique features in XMS is that challenge responses can be forwarded off to another email address so you can have a secretary go through and enter the captcha codes.

Because the bounces are handled in realtime by the SMTP server - the server can react to these bounces. So if for instance Hotmail is has started blocking because of too many connections while your sending your newsletter - we will have the ability to pause or delay all remaining hotmail email from going out. We have the internal capability to do this now, but we haven't yet completed it, so that feature is coming soon.

Bottom line is that you can increase your deliverability by using intelligent bounce management you can easily filter out challenge response bounces, and you can react in realtime to the actions of ISP's. There are of course the obvious reasons to use bounce processing as well - to keep a clean list, so your not blocked by dictionary attack filters. The obvious reasons are covered in the links I have at the top.

I'll post more about these guys and what makes them a great company later but for now I've gotta hit the road. Well, real quick, from small agile teams often come some of the greatest inventions and developments. You can believe me when I say ActivSoftware is one such team. l8r