High performance electronic message delivery engine

Abstract

In a messaging system interfaced through the Internet, a method for processing a message from a sender and intended for delivery to at least one recipient, which sender is interfaced to the Internet through a sender server and which recipient is interfaced to the Internet through a recipient server, where the message includes at least recipient information and message body, is disclosed. The method includes testing the recipient information by establishing a temporary test connection through the Internet from the sender server to the recipient server, before relying on the recipient information for sending the message, so as to provide an indication of deliverability of the message to the recipient without using an SMTP VRFY command.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates generally to electronic messaging systems and, more particularly, to an electronic message delivery system for processing electronic messages from a sender to a recipient through the Internet. Electronic Message Delivery Challenges Electronic messaging has quickly become an integral part of everyday life in modern society. Today, electronic mail (e-mail) is the most widely used application of the Internet and the fastest growing communication medium. In addition to the dramatic expansion of one-to-one user correspondence, many companies have come to realize that regular outbound electronic message communication, as well as automated customer care services via e-mail, can strengthen a company's relationship with its customers. However, sending and receiving high volumes of e-mail presents a number of technical challenges such as, for example: 1) management and support of ballooning infrastructures for high volume sending; 2...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The MTA processes and characteristics described above have not changed fundamentally since the first modern MTA application, sendmail, was released in 1981. To date, advances in the art of MTA e-mail delivery have not altered any of the fundamental processes and characteristics as described above, but have, rather, worked within their constraints to optimize delivery performance by improving the speed and efficiency by which these processes are performed.

To such end, recent advances in the art have developed in conjunction with advances in the functionality of hardware operating systems that support certain of the existing key processes for MTA e-mail delivery, namely, the generation of socket connections to recipient MTAs and the storage and retrieval of message files to and from the hard drive, or file input/output (i.e., file I/O).

The generation of socket connections is the foundation of SMTP mail delivery. In the earliest embodiment of the art, sendmail, the method for establishing a socket connection to a recipient MTA relied upon the creation of a new instance of the application for each new socket (i.e., process-based socket connection). This approach is inherently processor intensive and limits delivery speed to the rate at which the application can instantiate itself on the hardware.

As e-mail volumes have increased, and the practice of sending messages to large lists of recipients for publishing, marketing and other purposes emerged, interest in improving the speed and processing performance of e-mail MTAs has intensified. At the same time, advances in operating systems provided the ability to support multiple concurrent chains of commands within a program (i.e., threads), enabling concurrent processes in support of multiple simultaneous data transactions with substantially lower processing overhead than required for instantiation. Thus, an e-mail MTA could generate multiple socket connections simultaneously, enabling the parallel processing of SMTP connections for much faster...

Problems solved by technology

However, sending and receiving high volumes of e-mail presents a number of technical challenges such as, for example: 1) management and support of ballooning infrastructures for high volume sending; 2) maintenance of security on an application that is open to the Internet; 3) the need to apply virus, content and other filters to e-mail as it enters or departs the network; 4) management and prioritization of message queues; 5) the use of native customer data to trigger, target and define messages to customers; 6) management of inbound “bounced” e-mail; 7) the ability to consistently and automatically support customer preferences; and 8) executing delivery quickly and efficiently.

Meeting these challenges for scalable electronic messaging programs has been difficult, if not impossible, using available technology and has required substantial investment in hardware and human capital.

The processing of bounces and resends consumes the available processing capability of the sender MTA and MDA and utilizes additional communication bandwidth while transmitting and receiving multiple e-mails during the process.

Applicants submit that the aforedescribed process of bounces and resends uses undesirable amounts of processing time and bandwidth in the e-mail delivery system of the prior art.

This approach is inherently processor intensive and limits delivery speed to the rate at which the application can instantiate itself on the hardware.

The Sendmail MTA performs the most poorly, as its speed is impaired by instantiation for socket connections and standard file I / O processing.

However, there is no provision for acting upon messages before an event occurs and, consequently, there is no facility for acting upon messages traveling OUTBOUND from a server when a sending server is initiating actions.

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