The New Era of Managed Messaging
Lured by the emerging benefits of integrated multi-media messaging, end-to-end tracking and value-added services, businesses are expected to make electronic messaging the next hot area in IT outsourcing. Managed messaging represents the logical evolution of a technology — electronic messaging — that has already sparked a revolution. Empowered by the Internet, electronic messaging has in a relatively short time transformed the way organizations communicate. In the hands of outsourcing experts email marketing technology promises to forge even greater communications innovation in the months to come.
The message store is open. With visionary storekeepers like USA.NET, business customers are lining up to get a piece of the communications future.
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Publisher of Pricing Manuals for Technicians Writes New Chapter in Messaging Cost Savings
As a publisher of pricing manuals for commercial and residential plumbing, electrical, and heating and air conditioning technicians, Callahan-Roach knows a little something about costs. But it wasn’t until the subsidiary of Group Maintenance of America Corp. was ordered to outsource its fundamental IT services that Callahan-Roach discovered the business sense of managed messaging.
The escalating cost of maintaining Callahan-Roach’s company intranet led the company to turn over the job of designing and running its email system to USA.NET. By partnering with USA.NET, Callahan-Roach was able to discard its client-side email software, eliminate an in-house IT position and assign the dramatically reduced administrative tasks to a secretary-level staff person.
“The savings are pretty astronomical, when you consider that the time associated with managing and maintaining the company’s email system has been completely alleviated,” says Steve Harris, director of IT for Callahan-Roach. “We now have a fixed-cost solution that is centralized and allows for remote access.”
Cost savings weren’t the only benefit, though. Callahan-Roach is also using USA.NET Professional Messaging features to distribute training information to customers signed up for its training courses. Each customer receives a special Web-based email address that serves as a conduit for course material, administrative information and links to related course sites.
Anatomy of a USA.NET Message
It’s easier to see how all the technology components come together if we trace the progress of a message through the USA.NET message store. A pool of special servers, called Message Transfer Agents (MTAs), function as receiving agents for email messages. The MTA servers are load-balanced, meaning that processing tasks are directed toward several servers according to their availability. When a new message comes in, the MTA makes a connection to the master directory, which contains information about all the individual mailboxes in the USA.NET databases. The MTA confirms whether the recipient’s mailbox is in the directory. If not, the message is returned to sender. If the recipient is validated, the MTA attaches information to the email in the form of a header directing the system to the correct database containing the recipient’s mailbox. Then, the MTA puts the message in a queue.
From there, the Message Queuing Agent (MQA) takes over. The MQA inserts another header into the email to create an audit trail, and then looks up the rules drawn up by the recipient. These rules are simply filtering commands created by the end user that direct the system to take certain actions. For example, a user might have created a rule requiring that all messages with the word “money” in them be put in the user’s financial folder. Based on these filters, the MQA can take one of three actions:
1. Deliver the incoming message to a folder created by the user.
2. Forward the message to another email address. If this happens, another server—the Message Delivery Agent (MDA)—puts the message in an outgoing queue where it’s ultimately sent to an MTA in another messaging system.
3. Delete the message (to prevent spamming, etc.).
In Spanish, Portuguese or Chinese, Electronic Messaging Still Speaks Language of Business
Electronic messaging is not just an American phenomenon, of course. Two recent agreements between USA.NET and online companies in Latin America and China underscore the international potential of managed messaging.
Nearly one million Latin American customers regularly visit Zona Financiera, the region’s largest online financial marketplace designed to deliver daily financial news and information via the Web. Zona users will now also have access to USA.NET Professional Messaging services, following an agreement between Zona Financiera and USA.NET. Not only will the Spanish and Portuguese-language messaging service offer users reliable Webmail with junk mail blockers, it allows Zona to customize login pages and brand the interface. Zona Financiera will also benefit by increasing customer traffic, driving revenue and building brand equity.
Halfway across the world in China, where online usage is expected to grow more than 300 percent this year, an agreement between USA.NET and CathayOnline Inc., a leading Chinese ISP, will also bring managed messaging services to individual and business users of CathayOnline’s Internet services.
The Chinese Internet services company plans to bundle USA.NET Professional Messaging with Internet access service for its individual consumers. CathayOnline will also market USA.NET’s value-added email service to its corporate customers as TorchMail. For the first time, the messaging service will be offered in Chinese