MPP for ISP

Was at a big meeting with some folks that run a service provider, and we were going over their architecture, and the question came up, as it almost always does, why in the world should we go with MPP?

You see, while they had solved some of the most intractable problems facing an ISP in terms of email, with the main one being -- while people truly hate spam, just let one customer miss one email they were supposed to get (what we call a false positive), and you won't ever hear the end of it. Well, they had pretty much solved this problem cold.

But now, due to their popularity, new problems were arising. One, which I won't get into much, is scalability. Now that they had so many customers, they needed scalability, which we had in spades.

The other, and more insolvable problem for them, was the demand for -- as more and more people use email, and use it for different reasons -- their customers were demanding more flexibility from their email, choices that influenced both cost and usability. And anyone that studies the evolution of a product knows that, as a product travels along its life cycle, it tends to evolve from a simple product with little choice into a much more complex multiple-choice product.

Henry Ford himself said, "You can have any color car you want, as long as you want black." That was in the era of the Model T, when just having a car was enough. Well just the other day I saw a car colored in a color I never even knew existed, and all I can say was it was a cross between purple and fucsia (not exactly sure about the spelling of the last one).

The point being, this ISP's customers were starting to ask for different email choices, like archival, and different spam settings, and while their old email engine couldn't do that, they wondered if MPP could help with that?

Bingo, I thought. At long last, after years spent developing a product powerful enough to do exactly that, someone had finally asked us, Can it enable different settings for different users? Damn right it can.

Did Message Partners get the contract? You betcha!