SparkPost's Director of Support Scott Habicht talks through the new features in PMTA 5.0 and explains how companies can make the most of the new version.

1. 1@SparkPost
Scott Habicht
Senior Director of Support
PowerMTA Summit 2019
PowerMTA 5.0 New Features

2. 2@SparkPost
Who is Scott Habicht?
13
Years

3. 3@SparkPost
WebMonitor Refresh with Improvements
● Responsive design
● Displays well on mobile
● Traffic graph
● Auto refresh on/off
● Hostname in browser tab/faster navigation between servers

4. 4@SparkPost
WebMonitor Refresh with Improvements
● Sorting of table headers to give more control over data visualizations

5. 5@SparkPost
WebMonitor Refresh with Improvements
● Config option for changing the # of items per page and sort order
http-default-sort-order name | rcpt | size # sorts page by rcpt
http-default-max-items 10 # shows 10 rows on page (max 2^31-1)

6. 6@SparkPost
WebMonitor Refresh with Improvements
● Autocomplete support on
“commands” tab to help
guide the customer

7. 7@SparkPost
WebMonitor Refresh with Improvements
● Config option to limit access to log file downloads tab
http-access 0/0 monitor,deny-logs

8. 8@SparkPost
WebMonitor Refresh with Improvements
● Improvements to the Configuration Edit page
● Search in page supported

9. 9@SparkPost
JSON-Formatted outputs for PowerMTA monitoring commands
● JSON is a simpler format to ingest than XML.
● JSON output also makes it easy to integrate with the
increasing number of applications, filter example,
graphing tools, that consume JSON formatted data.
● PowerMTA UI actually read JSON data under the hood

10. 10@SparkPost
Email Submissions via HTTP - REST Transmissions
● Customers can directly inject a JSON-formatted email into PowerMTA using an HTTP REST
API interface.
● This makes it easier to integrate email submission into existing web applications without
necessarily having to change context to SMTP to submit messages in to PowerMTA.
● Preformatted messages - no mail-merge.

11. 11@SparkPost
HTTP Delivery Webhooks
● Allows emails to be delivered from PowerMTA to a destination endpoint using HTTP/HTTPS
● Makes implementing unsubscribe hooks and similar innovations much easier
● Same format as SparkPost relay webhooks
● JSON, JSON, JSON
Content-Type set to application/json
<domain bounce.mydomain.com>
type http-delivery
http-delivery-url http://webhooks.endpoint.com:8181/api/v1/email
</domain>

12. 12@SparkPost
Opportunistic DANE (DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities)
● Now supported
● Woks best with a DNSSEC Server
● Certificate Transparency
○ ensuring that rogue CAs cannot issue certificates without the permission of the
domain holder without being detected
● DNS Certification Authority Authorization
○ limiting which CAs can issue certificates for a given domain
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3_12ea2npE

13. 13@SparkPost
SparkPost Signals Support
● PowerMTA now ships with a connector that, when enabled, allows logs to be sent to
SparkPost for analysis.
● Compare your on-prem sending to that of trillions of emails a year to get the most out of
your program.

14. 14@SparkPost
MX Rollup and Cold VirtualMTA
● MX Rollup is a PMTA feature that consolidates all recipient domains that are handled by the
same MX(es) into a single queue.
● Cold VMTA is a feature that’s used to warm cold IPs.
● The revision to this pair of features now allows the cold VMTA feature to be aware of any
MX Rollup work going on behind the scenes.
● It helps protect cold IPs more by making sure that the rolled up queue doesn’t have too
many messages in it.

15. 15@SparkPost
MX Rollup and Cold VirtualMTA (Before)
Hotmail
100
Outlook
100
Warm VMTA
Hotmail
Outlook
Outlook
Rollup
Cold
Limit
10
per
day
Cold VMTA
Hotmail
Outlook
Outlook
Rollup
180 20
90
90
10
10

16. 16@SparkPost
MX Rollup and Cold VirtualMTA (After)
Hotmail
100
Outlook
100
Warm VMTA
Hotmail
Outlook
Outlook
Rollup
Cold
Limit
10
per
day
Cold VMTA
Hotmail
Outlook
Outlook
Rollup
190 10
10

17. 17@SparkPost
Outbound Proxy Support
● PowerMTA supports the use of HAProxy protocol for outbound traffic.
● This allows customers to deploy all their source IPs on an external proxy server instead of
being deployed on the individual PowerMTA nodes.
● The internal PowerMTA nodes will route their email through the correct source IP deployed
on proxy node via the use of proxy protocol.
● This makes it very simple to load balance outbound traffic across multiple PowerMTA
nodes.
<proxy p1>
server e.f.g.h 5000
client m.n.o.p 9999 client.hostname.com
</proxy>
<proxy p2>
server e.f.g.h:5000
client i.j.k.l:9999 client2.hostname.com
</proxy>
<virtual-mta vmta2>
smtp-source-host 1.2.3.4 vmta.hostname.com
use-proxy p1,p2 # CSV list for failover
</virtual-mta>

18. 18@SparkPost
Questions?