I’ve had some pressure from time to time, to outsource our SMTP gateway function. There are some legitimate reasons for doing this but there are also some fairly serious drawbacks as well. Right now it appears tha PostIni is suffering a significant outage and I can’t email Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, I said. Just think about how many other enormous companies are being affected by this outage right now!
As I have resisted the pressure to outsource everything from backup storage to SMTP servers, we are not one of those companies stuck in the mud today. This does highlight one of the more serious drawbacks to having your SMTP outsourced. Yes they have redundant servers. Yes they have redundant networks. Yet somehow they are experiencing an outage.
I want our SMTP presense to be diverse not only in available servers to connect to, but also geographically and platform-ially (what?!). Ideally we should have multiple MX records, pointed to multiple servers in multiple geographic locations with servers of multiple platform types, to reduce the chances of a single type of failure spreading across our redundant infrastructure. If we use Brightmail, IIS, and Domino as our SMTP gateways, the chances are pretty slim that a bad IIS patch is going to take the whole thing down.
So is outsourcing good, or bad? Yes. There are benefits and drawbacks, much like everything else in the IT world. Do you have to outsource it 100%? No, and in fact I think that’d be crazy. Make PostIni your primary MX target if you want, but offer the world some of your own SMTP servers as a backup.
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MX Logic is also a SaaS, but we believe a better alternative with hundreds of replicated servers. The clients that we’ve moved over to them have been floored with the results. We like it so much that we’ve become an MX Logic Partner.
In our experience many spammers will connect to the highest numbered MX so if you set yours as a backup the spam will bypass the filter.
We’ve used Messagelabs for almost 10 years now and have never had a problem with incoming email that we didn’t cause ourselves (once I put in the wrong new IP and removed the working one simultaneously….a few hours without email for that one). They’re primarily billed as a Spam or A/V filtering service, but do provide 1 week of storage if our servers are down, which we’ve routinely used for migrations, outages, upgrades and the like. They’re quite geographically distributed as well, even providing ‘local’ datacenter services to our different international locations. They do filter out nearly all our spam, and we run no other spam or a/v filtering of email on our servers and have never had a problem. We push around 2Mil emails per year through them.
Of course they were bought by Symantec about a year ago…Not my favorite company these days…but we haven’t noticed any changes/ill-effects yet besides a logo change.
Good point Steve, and I’d never recommend that anyone run an unprotected SMTP gateway even as a backup.
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
Hi Polprav – of course you can!
Hi from Spain. I am user of, and a reseller for Preserv8 http://www.ctseuropa.es Preserv8 provide a unified platform which whilst similar to Postini in many ways surpasses it in many others. It has been written from the ground up in .net and is the only S+S unified mail platform certified by Microsoft. Their patented approach to Spam employs heuristic (rule based) and bohesian (reputation based) filters.
From a user perspective
- I now have confidence with my DR plan as I never run the risk of losing any of my mails.
- I can review my mails from anywhere in the world in their original html formatting
- All my organisations mails are branded in the cloud
- SPAM has been virtually eliminated
- And most of all I receive BI reporting which helps me with marketing campaigns etc.
Following the success of this oursourcing we are now actively reviewing other areas of the business to outsource.