We are very fortunate to have a wonderful relationship with Rackspace. We recently had a very large joint win supplied from them so as a kind gesture we put together a short video thanking the Racker’s for their continued support and efforts. I thought I would share so enjoy!

When designing large scale systems, it's very easy to get caught up in details that will result in massive complexity. The most important thing is to remember is to focus on the problem you are trying to solve and keep things as simple as possible. Design your system in such a way that allows easy growth so that when your platform need to scale and adoption takes off you can easily build.

Think about this like Legos or building blocks. Create a system that is modular in design that will allow you to add capacity where you need without adding complexity and tons of iron. If you take the time to design it properly, it will provide the flexibility you need without breaking the bank.

Many different things come to mind when I hear the word “Cloud.” To be honest, the first thing that I think of is this classic Homer Simpson audio clip. My co-founder Frank Addante often said I should write a book and base every milestone or event in my life on some clip from The Simpsons (I guess that is why the show it still going strong after all these years).

In any case, back to reality. Don’t get me wrong, I think the cloud idea is fantastic. Utility computing, capacity on demand, real-time scalability are all great ideas that allow maximum flexibility, provide massive cost savings and allow companies to maximize the computing power amassed over time. The one thing I don’t like about the cloud is that it seems a lot of people are very confused about the concept. I think this is quickly being pushed into the same category as “Web 2.0” and other classics.

My opinion is that simply offering your solution as a SaaS (or Software as a Service) does not constitute “being in the cloud.” While this is an important component to this relatively new way to offer software products today and adoption rates are very high, this is not the sole concept of the cloud. I think the company rPath does a good job at laying out the base components needed for adoption of the cloud computing model.

Here's the moral to my post. Whether we have the terminology right or wrong, the goal of the cloud is extremely promising. Being an infrastructure guy, I salivate at the opportunity to architect, deploy and manage such systems. I love scale, high capacity, on-demand access and repeatability/reusability. It is also exciting to keep pushing our own technology to allow our customers more flexibility when they deploy (whether software, hardware or virtual appliance).

As you may know, email is thirty years old and its underlying infrastructure was never built with security and accountability in mind. No one ever thought that email would become as widely used as it is today, that the Internet itself would be subject to so much abuse.

The original email and Internet systems that we know today weren't invented by Al Gore, but by our own government missile defense system group called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), whose primary job was to handle research for all space and strategic missile research. NASA was then formed, and the activities of ARPA moved away from aeronautics and focused mainly on computer science and information processing.

One of ARPA's goals was to connect mainframe computers at different universities around the country so that they would be able to communicate using a common language and a common protocol. Thus the ARPAnet -- the world's first multiple-site computer network -- was created in 1969. In order to have an account on these systems you simply asked for one and they just gave it to you almost without ANY questions, completely overlooking security and accountability.

Well, obviously, as time went by and the systems got larger and more interconnected, some people figured out the vulnerabilities and started to send out the first of many billions of unsolicited messages now known as SPAM. The question now comes down to how we can possibly patch a hole this big. Email authentication technologies like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are a start.

DKIM is a signature/cryptography-based sender authentication protocol developed in order to address the problem of forged email messages (missing security and accountability) and to allow an organization or individual to take reasonability for the message it sends, which has given rise to the concept of email reputation. Now, I won't bore you with the details of email reputation and authentication, but I do want to focus on why we got involved in this early on.

Email is now about as mainstream as any technology can be, yet the viability of email is continually being threatened by viruses, spam, spoofing, and phishing. All of these threats are shaking the confidence in email as a viable tool for communications and conducting business, and StrongMail is committed to help protect it. We have been participating in the DKIM standard since day-one, and we are proud to have our own employees acknowledged for their hard work in the standard.

StrongMail was the first technology provider to integrate support for all emerging authentication protocols into its outbound email products to simplify compliance with whatever standards are mandated. DKIM has since gained a lot of traction, and AOL, GMAIL, and Yahoo! now use it successfully in production.

Unless you're a member of the CIA, a Matrix super fan, or a cryptographic expert, signature-based authentication can be difficult to understand. In StrongMail, you don't have to think about any of that stuff, since we make it as easy as 1-2-3 with our step-by-step interface, which will either create, upload, or use the existing keys needed to properly sign and verify any email.

In fact, StrongMail is specifically designed to make it easy to work in the complex and ever-changing world of email standards. You even have the ability to apply authentication to certain email streams or campaigns based on your needs. Our offering is so simple that anybody with a mouse, keyboard, and monitor can institute email authentication.

Overall, DKIM brings accountability to the sender, establishes a reputation and confirms whether they should be sending email from a certain domain. By doing this, receivers can better separate mail streams from those who are good and those who are bad, which enables better anti-spam technologies and reduces false positives.

In terms of technology, it's amazing how much progress we've seen in such a short period of time. With all the wonderful technology that exists today, I can now plug an IP phone into any decent broadband connection and conduct business like I am in HQ, when, in fact, I might be thousands of miles away. It's also amazing how important email has become to life and business. Whether it’s corp-to-corp email servers like Microsoft Exchange or world-class, on-premise outbound email servers like StrongMail (shameless plug), most modern businesses would be hard-pressed to live without it.

As I write this blog, I am also dealing with an internal Microsoft Exchange issue, and, even though my IP phone is handy, it can't compensate for the utility and effectiveness of email. Fortunately, we have email continuity in place, DR plans and full backups, because my preferred way to get and process information is email. The days of a simple phone call seem long forgotten (if not even preposterous for me to suggest). When Exchange went down and the back-up system was coming online, I actually heard people say “you mean I have to call someone to setup up a meeting?” as if to say that is the craziest idea they have ever heard.

As painful as an Exchange outage can be, losing your enterprise transactional email capabilities could cripple your ecommerce efforts. That's why trusting the emailing of order notifications and password reminders to your shopping cart system is never a good idea. These systems are designed to process online orders, not send email.

Email is certainly here to stay. It is an extremely important and effective communications tool , and it is growing by leaps and bounds every day. It seems like nearly everyone is rushing to buy the latest and greatest smart phones to get “on-the-go” access to web-based email like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail and to connect to their corporate email. As the founder of an email company, this prevalence and reliance on email would seem to indicate that I'm in the right business and not just drinking the Kool-Aid.

Respectfully yours,
Tim “email is life” McQuillen

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.