MTA

Selligent MTA (Mail Transmitting Agent) is the Selligent component responsible for the delivery of emails generated by the Selligent platform.  The component is designed to allow processing of high volumes of email traffic at high speed. Configuration is performed from within the Selligent configuration. By respecting predefined rules and quality checks, high delivery rates are ensured.

Selligent emails can be transferred by means of the MTA itself, taking into account all settings and rules defined for that MTA. Another option is to send emails through the Selligent GRID. In that case a virtual MTA is configured on the client installation, routing all mails to the GRID. What is the GRID?The Selligent Grid is a central intelligent mail transmitting platform through which customer mails are transferred and handled. It provides more than 1000 IP addresses for sending out emails. These IP’s are used commonly by all customers, although customers still have the option to use dedicated IP addresses if required. 

Customers send their emails slots to the grid and receive feedback on the status. All logic is centralized within the GRID.

Because one central system is in charge, management is centralized. IP addresses are shared among customers, ensuring high IP quality thanks to large email volumes. Additionally, when new customers arrive, they use these same IP’s and a warm-up period is no longer required.

The GRID is available for SAAS users, but also for customers with local installations, thanks to the virtual engine that operates as a proxy to the GRID.

 

The configuration of the MTA is available from within the Selligent configuration section via the entry MTA configuration.

MTA Infrastructure: provides the configuration of MTA components (Engine and queue) and displays reporting on their current status (number of emails treated, queue size, etc.)

MTA Maildomains: regroups the list of targeted mail domains with their configuration (DNS, Domain keys, default queue, etc)

It is also possible, for each maildomain,  to certify one or more email accounts and add a digital signature to emails sent from these email accounts.  This is only available however for in-house installs with a local MTA.

MTA Rules: rules allow configuring domain-throttling for the different mail-domains. These settings are used by the MTA when sending out emails to avoid blacklisting operation (server saturation) or connection closing. When bounces are returned by the GRID, these rules are checked to ensure triggering custom rules on the Selligent installation.

MTA Domainkeys: Domainkeys is an email authentication system designed to verify the DNS domain of an email sender and the message integrity. The domainkeys specification has adopted aspects of Identified Internet Mail to create an enhanced protocol called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). When transferring slots to the GRID, this information is added.

 

As this is a very technical aspect of the complete setup, a dedicated document is available, which can be obtained on demand.