It has been great times over the past 5+ years since founding StrongMail. I found out that Frank is now an aspiring actor. I often wonder “is there anything he can’t do?” so I thought I would share this great little vignette about his new company called The Rubicon Project. Enjoy.

The major issue with email is that it has expanded far beyond personal communication. The systems needed today require a lot of functionality with little to no maintenance and resources to run them. In the beginning, it was important to focus on rapid scale, deployment and ease of use; starting first with the method at which email is delivered.

A majority of the software that existed at the time could always get you started but was traditionally very hard to scale without adding a lot of additional hardware and bodies to run it. The most important part was not only sheer speed but also the flexibility and control needed to build and deploy email applications.

When we started StrongMail, we realized that an ASP model would be impractical to deliver everything customers wanted. So rather than focus on only building a world class MTA, the decision was made to build an application server to allow rapid development and deployment (mind you, this decision was made over time and out of necessity for what we needed to support our customers).

The two main pieces consist of EAS (or the Email Application Server) and the MTA (or the Message Transfer Agent). Traditional terms are closer to a “client/server” model where each can act in unison with one another or with “n” number of systems for scale. Again, only focusing on building an MTA was not the full solution. Sure, the MTA needed to be very fast, but it also needed all the necessary dials and knobs to allow customers to control their email streams according to their business. Email goes far beyond that. It was also vital to give customers full visibility into what was happening with their email and most importantly allow businesses to make decisions in real time to take corrective action.

SPAM, viruses and phishing attempts have greatly changed the way we conduct transactions today, so it's important to have a platform that demystified the problems and allows companies to take control. Email has gone far beyond “batch and blast” methods of the past, and there are very real metrics tied to email communications and delivery. Companies can spend more time focusing on what is core to their business and not building email infrastructure. This is why StrongMail was created. To produce world-class, on-premise infrastructure to allow customers to optimize the way they do business.