Your mail transfer agent (MTA) is the backbone of your email infrastructure. And if your business is responsible for sending and receiving billions of messages per month on behalf of your customers, it’s crucial to choose an MTA that features the reliability, performance, and flexibility you need to scale your organization effortlessly.

In this article, we’ll cover some of the factors to weigh up when it comes to selecting the right MTA for your enterprise.

What is an MTA?

An MTA is a software application that enables your business to send, receive, and route email messages from one network to another. It serves as the intermediary between mail servers, ensuring that emails are delivered to their intended recipients.

With the increase in email volume and complexity of modern businesses, having a reliable and high-performance MTA is crucial for ensuring email speed and deliverability rates on all of your customers’ incoming and outgoing messages. By choosing the right MTA, you can optimize business efficiency, reduce your technology costs, and increase customer satisfaction. 

What problems does a high-volume MTA solve?

While a cloud-based email API may be an adequate solution for standalone brands, martech companies and ESPs that support many brands through their platforms require a more robust MTA.  A high-volume MTA can handle large volumes of email traffic with more efficient routing, delivery, and tracking capabilities, with minimal latency.  This means faster delivery times and lower bounce rates, resulting in improved customer engagement and conversion rates. 

High-volume MTAs also facilitate high rates of email deliverability. A high-volume MTA has sophisticated algorithms and processes in place to monitor delivery rates and identify any potential issues that may be affecting deliverability. It also offers features such as IP warming and reputation management to maintain a good sender reputation and avoid being blacklisted by ISPs.

With advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, a high-volume MTA can give marketers valuable insights into their email performance. This includes data on open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and more. These insights can help your business analyze trends in performance and understand when it may make sense to change your policy rules.

Open-source MTAs vs. proprietary MTAs

Open-source MTAs such as Postfix or Exim may be good options for smaller companies, but for larger enterprises that require complex configuration, choosing a proprietary MTA like Halon is a better option. 

Benefits of open-source

Choosing an open-source tool is often free, and there are no licensing fees, which can result in lower overall costs than a proprietary solution.

Transparency is also a benefit: the entire repository of code exists online, and your development team can connect with the existing developer community to learn what’s worked for others. Additionally, open-source tools often have active community support and frequent updates, making them more reliable and secure.

Smaller businesses or those just starting out may benefit from using an open-source MTA due to its cost-effectiveness and flexibility. However, as a company grows and its email needs become more complex, investing in a proprietary MTA with advanced features and support may be necessary to ensure efficient routing and high performance.

Benefits of a proprietary solution

By choosing a proprietary solution, you can instantly tap into a set of pre-built tools and get hands-on guidance from an expert development community. Halon offers a full set of ready-made components that are custom-built to optimize performance, with best-in-class configuration tools that reduce code and hardware by 70%.

Unlike open-source solutions, Halon’s codebase is custom-built to support unparalleled performance at scale, with queue and policy rules to ensure maximum deliverability. Halon also offers a flexible, tailored configuration format that streamlines the development of new features.

Because our solution is intended to operate in high-volume environments, we’ve set up asynchronous queue management features, which are optimized for rapid performance. This ensures that your emails are delivered quickly and efficiently, without any delays or disruptions. We’ve also optimized our MTA to run in a containerized environment using Docker or Kubernetes, making it easy to turn on or off different components, and autoscale your deployment in response to changing demands.

We also understand how crucial email security is to your business operations, and have closely collaborated with the threat protection community to build seamless integrations with leading vendors including Cyren and Sophos.  This allows our MTA to automatically scan and filter incoming emails, protecting your customers from spam, viruses, malware, and other threats. 

For businesses seeking a ready-to-use, enterprise-grade MTA with dedicated customer support and continuous improvements, Halon represents a best-in-class proprietary option.

Best practices for choosing an MTA

When selecting an MTA for your email infrastructure, pay attention to these criteria:

• Ease of setup and use
  Will your team need to build a custom solution from scratch, or can you build quickly using pre-built components and ready-made integrations? How user-friendly is the solution for ongoing management? Will you have access to an expert support team?
• Performance
  Can the solution scale to meet your business needs with minimal latency? Ensure that it can meet your needs around speed, volume, and email send capacity.
• Configurability
  Is the solution rigid, or can you set up custom configurations to meet different use cases for all of your user segments?
• Security
  Does the MTA facilitate seamless integrations with anti-spam and anti-virus software? Does it include encryption and authentication?
• Deliverability
  Make sure the solution you’re considering provides the customization options you need to optimize email deliverability, including per-ISP delivery settings, IP management, abuse mailbox management, feedback loop registration, bounce management rules, message headers, and other policy rules. 
• Vendor reputation
  When choosing a proprietary solution, it’s important to choose a proven vendor that has a track record of success working with enterprise-grade customers. You can review case studies, such as Halon’s work with Maskatel that reduced email support calls by 90%, to understand the potential ROI of choosing a proprietary MTA. 
  
  

Choosing the right MTA for your business 

Selecting the right MTA for your business needs comes down to a variety of factors, but if you’re seeking a highly customizable, enterprise-grade solution that will ensure high performance even during peak times, it’s important to choose a solution that’s set up for the task at hand.

Halon Engage is a powerful email infrastructure custom-designed for large-scale senders, with all of the pre-built components you need to architect and implement a customized email solution that operates the way you need it to. With Halon, you can boost speed and performance with advanced caching techniques, intelligent load balancing, and automatic scaling. This ensures that even during peak times, your email delivery will remain stable and efficient, providing a seamless experience for your customers. If you’re ready to move to an MTA that will support your business growth and provide the flexibility you need, then Halon Engage is the solution for you. Book a demo today!