Applied Innovations is a web hosting company known for its expertise in managed Windows hosting solutions.
Email is an absolutely critical service to customers of Applied Innovations. The web host’s growing problem with blocked email delivery due to IP blocklisting was a concern.
“If email doesn’t go through it’s a huge deal to our customers—even more so than if their website crashes,” says Jess Coburn, CEO of Applied Innovations. “They depend on email to close deals. If email isn’t delivered because our IP gets blocklisted, complaints and support tickets go through the roof.”
With almost a dozen shared mail servers and upwards of 10,000 email domains (and tens of thousands more individual email users), the blocklisting problem was a strain on the company’s support time.
Jess estimates that Applied Innovations was losing the equivalent of an employee per week in labour costs to deal with blocklisting issues. “That doesn’t include customer satisfaction costs,” he adds. “It was a huge frustration for our customers and increased our churn.”
Applied Innovations needed an outbound spam filter to solve their blocklisting problem. They evaluated a number of different solutions by well-known vendors, but all of them required significant operational changes, new equipment investments, the purchase of unnecessary features, or additional maintenance.
They found the right solution in MailChannels Outbound.
“In a shared environment there is no way I’d operate without using MailChannels Outbound,” Jess says. “I absolutely love the platform. It’s made a world of difference for us since we started using it in 2013.”
“In a shared environment there is no way I’d operate without using MailChannels,” Jess says. “I absolutely love the platform. It’s made a world of difference for us since we started using it in 2013.”
MailChannels Outbound is a hosted service that combines an SMTP relay and outbound spam filtering to eliminate IP blocklisting problems related to compromised end-user accounts and spam.
The solution tracks the reputation of a customer’s network users to identify spammers and outsources blocklisting and abuse management problems by sending outbound SMTP traffic through MailChannels IP addresses. It’s provided as a monthly subscription service where customers only pay for what they use, with no long-term commitment.
Wayne Lansdowne, who is Chief Systems Architect at Applied Innovations, says the simplicity and speed of implementing MailChannels Outbound Filtering was a major plus. The solution required minimal operational changes or staff training, and his team deployed it quickly with little internal investment.
“We had MailChannels Outbound up and running in a matter of hours,” Wayne says. “We appreciate that ease, as well as the solution’s utility-based pricing. And we know we can trust MailChannels to provide reliable email delivery while helping us find spammers in our network more quickly.”
Another plus, says Jess Coburn, is the effect of MailChannels Outbound on Applied Innovations’ support workload and associated costs. He estimates that support tickets related to blocklisting have dropped to about two percent from about 20 percent since they adopted the service.
“Before we used MailChannels, a compromised account happened multiple times per day which meant thousands of domains got blocklisted weekly and all those customers were affected,” Jess says. “Now, when an email gets flagged as spam, MailChannels filters it out to a lower-reputed server while legitimate mail keeps owing. This is far less painful to customers because you’re impacting one or two people instead of tens of thousands.”