1. white paper By Tom Daly, Chief Scientist
Dyn’s Three-Pronged Approach To Improved
Email Delivery
The Email Delivery Problem The DynECT Email Delivery Message
For businesses around the world, the challenge of Transfer Agent (MTA) Platform
getting both transactional and bulk email messages to Dyn’s MTA systems are hosted in secure data centers
their intended recipients’ inboxes has proven to be an located in Newark, New Jersey, and Palo Alto, California.
ongoing challenge. Research has shown that the bene- Each data center connects to the Internet with full IP
fit of ensuring inbox delivery yields better engagement transit connections to tier one Internet Service Providers
of users, and as a result, more conversions of business (ISPs) including NTT, Tata and Cogent. Dyn manages our
for companies. own Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing and IP
addresses, ensuring the availability of IP addresses to
The challenge of reliably delivering email to the inbox is a dedicate to our MTAs.
three-pronged problem and requires the talent and skill
sets of a cross-functional team. It’s often an understaffed IP addresses and domain names used for relaying email
area of most businesses, especially as email delivery is are configured and managed by the system automatically
generally outside of a business’ core mission. to ensure ongoing email delivery. They are also checked
regularly against real-time DNS blacklists and reputation
databases such as SenderScore.org. These checks ensure
Solving The Email Delivery Problem that IPs and/or domains with delivery issues are removed
DynECT Email Delivery brings companies a new option: from use immediately and replaced by IPs and domains
email delivery as a managed service, allowing businesses held in a warm state ready to relay email.
to focus on their core mission, while infrastructure and
Dyn’s MTA systems also include automated support
email delivery experts from Dyn worry about the ongo-
for email authentication systems such as Sender Policy
ing day-to-day challenges with ensuring inbox delivery.
Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) –
DynECT Email Delivery takes a three-pronged approach areas where client configuration issues can account for
to solving the email delivery problem and provides significant delivery problems.
customers with the following:
Holistic management of SMTP connections is an addi-
• A highly robust SMTP/MTA platform through which tional factor in ensuring delivery. Each Dyn MTA receives
to send email messages. continuous feedback about the delivery status of
messages with all mail destinations, allowing Dyn to gain
• A suite of deep analytical tools to give marketers insight into send volumes and message cadence. This
and administrators rich insight into delivery. allows Dyn to strategically queue and deliver messages
• A team of email delivery professionals focused on to ISPs with the best opportunity of getting to the inbox.
monitoring the flow of messages and to provide This can significantly improve delivery rates to large ISPs
guidance to customers experiencing issues with such as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and others.
message content.
By focusing a team of experts in email technology, Deep Analytical Tools
Internet Infrastructure and software engineering, Dyn Ensuring that customers have access to data and reports
has become uniquely positioned to assist enterprises to measure the success of campaigns and messaging is
in solving the email delivery problem, thereby driving critical. Dyn provides customers with analytical data
revenue through user engagement. about the delivery of email, message bounce and spam
complaints, as well as insight into inbox delivery rates.
1
+1 888 840 3258 150 Dow Street
sales@dyn.com Manchester, NH
Uptime is the Bottom Line. http://dyn.com 03101 USA

2. white paper
Each email sent through DynECT Email Delivery (in- inbox acceptance rate of messages sent. Additionally,
cluding the FROM address, TO address and the delivery sampled messages are passed through popular anti-
status) is logged by the system for future analysis. In the spam systems, such as SpamAssassin, giving insight into
event an email message is rejected or bounced by an ISP, the relative SPAM disposition of messages sent.
non-delivery reports (NDRs) are automatically routed
back to DynECT Email Delivery servers for processing.
Access to Email Delivery Professionals
Additionally, should a recipient mark a message as SPAM
Even with the most robust delivery and reporting systems
and the hosting ISP supports email Feedback Loops (FBL),
supporting the technical needs of our customers, it takes
reports from the FBL are automatically processed by the
a team of email delivery professionals to continuously
system. Email recipients who bounce or mark messages
monitor message flow to the inbox. The email delivery
as SPAM are automatically added to an account level
team at Dyn constantly monitors the state of the MTA
suppression list, which inhibits future mailings to
infrastructure and is ready to respond to potential deliv-
the bouncing or complaining email address, thereby
ery issues surrounding ISP message relay rates (volume
reducing the overall bounce and complaint rates that
and cadence), IP and domain reputation and inbox
can ffect a sender’s reputation. HTTP-based callbacks
acceptance rates. Through years of email industry
are available of immediate notification of bouncing or
involvement and networking, the team is able to directly
complaining recipients.
reach out to ISPs to get issues resolved quickly when they
Message open tracking, an innovative development do arise.
by Dyn, allows customers to insert tracking pixels into
Ensuring that customers send engaging email that people
HTML emails to provide reporting to customers on users
actually want to read is another major factor to ensure
behavior with a particular message. Customers are
ongoing delivery of messages to the inbox. By analyzing
given insight into whether a user opened, skimmed or
the results of the inbox delivery verification process, the
completely read a message depending on how long the
team is able to make suggestions to customers regard-
message was opened. Links in messages can also be
ing message subject lines, body content and embedded
re-routed to Dyn’s link tracking servers, giving customers
links/media. Suggestions around message content are
reporting into user behavior about clicking links.
delivered to customers through our web portal and can
Customers can also uniquely tag and segment message
be used to help improve user engagement.
campaigns to allow for finer grained reporting of
messages through the use of custom X-Headers.
The system also performs automated verification of Summary
inbox delivery by sampling messages sent through the DynECT Email Delivery, a member of Dyn’s Infrastruc-
system and then sending those messages to dedicated ture-as-a-Service (IaaS) family of products, is uniquely
seed inboxes at ISPs located around the world. The data positioned to help businesses deal with the email
collected from this process allows Dyn to determine if delivery problem. With Dyn’s unique, three-pronged
the message was delivered to the inbox, spam folder or approach to the issue, more customers get their mail
“junk” folder. The results of this process are reported to the inbox, improving user engagement and increasing
back to our systems to give insight into the real-world conversions – all good things for growing a business.
author details
Tom Daly is the Chief Scientist at Dyn, the Internet
Infrastructure-as-a-Service leader that features a full
suite of DNS and Email Delivery solutions. Follow him
on Twitter: @TomDynInc and @DynInc.
2
Uptime is the Bottom Line. +1 888 840 3258 150 Dow Street
sales@dyn.com Manchester, NH
Copyright © 2012 Dyn. All rights reserved.
DynECT is a trademark or registered trademark of Dyn and such marks are protected by law. http://dyn.com 03101 USA