April interviews: features, jobs and savings

Sam Tuke May 8 2020 Share

Every week we ask email professionals what problems they face, and how Lightmeter can solve them. Two cloud hosts, a marketing agency, two IT consultants, and two inbox providers shared their experiences with us in April, and tested the latest Control Center interface. Here’s some of what we learned.

Features requested

Several interviewees already had monitoring systems set up for their mail network, and want Lightmeter to feed notifications into them. For these people that means support for Nagios / Icinga and Graphana

Kos, who hosts inboxes for SMEs, wants to be able to browse mail logs directly from the Lightmeter interface, to avoid the need to use SSH and decompression tools to fish out particular lines and events. That means a log viewer built-in to Lightmeter, making use of the formatted logs which Lightmeter 0.0.1 and newer already manages following automated processing.

Boris, a cloud hosting provider in Eastern Europe, wants to be able to manage problems which Lightmeter idenfifies like a simple to-do list, grouping problems an their fixes by status.

Would these features be useful to you? Speak your mind in the comments. For now they have been added to the public Product Backlog on Gitlab.

Jobs to be done

Sometimes the job that needs doing is obvious, but the corresponding features aren’t. Digging deeper in convesation led to the following insights.

Many applications which send transactional email have no built-in mail management features. This means that email addresses aren’t validated, bounces aren’t processed, and these applications quickly nosedive into poor IP reputation by continually sending messages to invalid or bouncing inboxes. Lightmeter could solve this at the server level by handling these features transparently, allowing the primary application, eg ecommerce software or SaaS backend, to “fire and forget” its email and delegate this work to us.

Some organisations which would love to move away from mail outsourcing and self-host need proof that Open Source mailtech is a viable for them. This means visual indicators and reports on mail network activity, as well as detailed guidance on the steps required to build their reputation with appropriate mail types and volumes. This is an interesting psychologyical component to the focus and messaging of the Lightmeter interfaces, and deserves further research.

For other organisations self-hosting mail is a matter of pride. Putting aside the considerable cost, privacy, and flexibility benefits of running mail in-house, the benefits for an organisation’s reputation, and association with security and expertise, is highly valued by some and by their customers.#

Anticipated benefits

Showing off the latest Control Center interface prototypes is always a highlight of the interview. Based on the features tested, we received an abundance of positive feedback.

An Indian IT consulting firm said they’d save two thirds of their tech team’s workload
Having a mail network overview in one place would also save him uncertainty and stress
Rob, an SME inbox provider, said he’d save 40-80 hours of his workload each month
In addition, his reaction time to incidents would save his customers disruption
Dan said he would save between $200 and $400 monthly in outsourcing fees