The blog has been kind of quiet lately but we’ve been VERY busy at work. If you haven’t noticed there have been many improvements to Email On-Demand over the past months including a new interface with beautiful reporting, a new API and many other new and improved user-friendly features. On-Premise customers don’t worry, we have been working hard on Hurricane MTA Server too.

Hurricane MTA Server is more important to us than ever now, since we are using it to power our SocketLabs Email On-Demand solution. This has led to several innovations and improvements in Hurricane MTA Server. Lately we have been working under-the-hood, strengthening the foundation of Hurricane MTA Server for future growth and leverage.

The latest production release of Hurricane MTA Server was pushed out quietly earlier this month but contained some really big improvements including:

• Support for running natively in 64-bit mode now allows Hurricane MTA Server access to much more RAM, increasing performance dramatically.
• Fully upgraded the backend statistical database to further increase its performance and scalability.
• Totally replaced the internals of the bounce and failure processing and analysis to provide much more accurate and specific bounce and failure codes.

Each of these items were a massive undertaking for us in their own right and we have been working on them for over a year. It is really great to finally see them come to fruition.

Follow John Alessi on Twitter: @johnalessi

Automatic Suppression Lists

The latest production release of Hurricane MTA Server adds powerful automatic suppression lists that boost your deliverability and protect your reputation by automatically blocking repeat emails to invalid addresses and email addresses that have filed complaints against you. This incredibly intelligent and automatic feature is out of beta and currently in production.

See this article for more information.

More Powerful IP Based Authentication and Account Mapping

Now, any account can be selected and authenticated by the source IP address. Simply edit the IP whitelist and add the account id to the end of the IP address separated by a pipe.

For example if you wanted all email coming from 66.72.15.29 to go through account 1024, you would enter the following entry in the whitelist:

66.72.15.29|1024

Critical Alerts

System alerts are now broken out into two levels: critical and standard. Critical and standard alerts can be sent to different email address lists, making it easy to escalate critical issues.

The alert level of each Dynamic Block Rule can now be set to standard or critical.

We built an auto-responder that can be used to test your bounce and feedback loop processing systems. Feel free to use it for your testing purposes.

fbl-test@service.socketlabs.com
Auto responds to From address with a feedback loop report in ARF format.

bounce-test@service.socketlabs.com
Auto responds to the Return-Path with a bounce message.

As a side note, the autoresponder was built using the .Net API in Hurricane MTA Server.