Anyway, on a more positive note, MXroute has grown up a lot and I'd love to share with you all.
As many of you have been aware my passion has been mostly on outbound email, getting it where it needs to go. For a long time my answer to that was that I couldn't do it alone, and I outsourced it to MailChannels for their unique configuration that would forward email from one IP to another if delivery had been rejected due to IP reputation.
MailChannels was great for a time, but over time delivery quality began to drop little by little. Perfectly fine emails would be rejected by filters, and more recently they even stopped forwarding emails to another IP if the email had been rejected due to the IP being blacklisted (this was unfortunately told to me directly after a complaint, and not up front, their advertising still says they do this).
Currently we have over 700 IP addresses, of immaculate reputation, in use for outbound delivery. This is a bit of a description of how the outbound email works right now:
When the email leaves the individual server, it goes to one of two redundant filter servers. From there, the email is filtered to reduce forwarded spam or malicious outbound events. Once filtered, it goes out to one of two redundant load balancers that go down the IP list and send each email to the next IP in line, balancing all of the traffic across our ranges. If an email is rejected, it is sent to another mail relay to try again from a different IP. For now, if it fails there, it goes to MailChannels as a final fallback. Given the way smtp_fallback functions, most of the email going out through MailChannels is just greylisted email, so that will likely be removed in the future for what we're considering to be a superior outbound delivery system.
We're also working on a new infrastructure that will eventually combine all servers into a giant geo-redundant cluster, and making great progress on it (already functional in many ways).
I'm happy to say that "tens of thousands of users" is not an understatement. MXroute is no longer a small email provider, even if we are still (and always will be) a family business. We're in this for the long game, and continually growing up as a service. It's been a pleasure to be able to share the process with all of you, and still plenty of it to come
