# PowerMTA: High-Volume Email Delivery

PowerMTA

Separate sending streams

Your sending applications

Your infrastructure

Virtual MTA 01

Transactional

Receipts and account messages

Sending IPs

Queue · rate limits · routing

Virtual MTA 02

Campaigns

Newsletters and promotions

Delivery to recipient mail servers

Illustrative configuration. Separate traffic by purpose, customer or sending requirements; scope capacity and licensing with the MTA team.

## Advanced infrastructure

Deploy PowerMTA on your own servers or in any public cloud. Achieve high-speed sending with a small hardware footprint, requiring fewer servers while delivering greater performance.

- **Smart Alerting**: Receive specific recommendations for resolving high-priority issues. Address list quality or low engagement problems before they impact your email performance.
- **Advanced monitoring**: Track delivery metrics and receive instant alerts for spam traps or blocklist issues. Take immediate action with expert recommendations to maintain sending reputation.
- **Comprehensive Analytics**: Review over 35 individual metrics affecting deliverability and engagement. Track bounces, blocks, and delivery rates with detailed per-domain, per-campaign, and per-recipient analytics.
- **Performance Monitoring**: Monitor sender reputation in real-time through SMTP responses from inbox providers. Make instant adjustments to optimize delivery based on live performance data.
- **Volume-Based Licensing**: Scale up or down based on your needs with volume-based licensing. Easily adjust for seasonal changes, testing, and disaster recovery without unnecessary costs.
- **Cloud-ready deployment**: Run PowerMTA on your own server or in any public cloud such as AWS or Azure, with a small hardware footprint that delivers high-speed sending at scale.

## Separate your sending streams.

PowerMTA lets you split traffic into independent streams, called virtual MTAs, inside a single instance. Each stream gets its own IPs, reputation, and rate limits, so your transactional mail, your marketing campaigns, and your per-customer sending stay isolated. Separating streams gives you more control over how traffic is managed. Shared domains and recipient-provider policies can still affect results. Route each stream directly from your servers or through another platform.

## Move to the hosted platform at your own pace.

You don't have to choose between PowerMTA and a hosted service. Run PowerMTA as a relay and send a slice of your traffic, say ten percent, on to the hosted [Bird Email API](/email-api), watch how it performs, then shift more when you're ready, all without repointing your sending code. Keep some streams on your own servers for as long as you like, or retire the on-prem footprint entirely once you've migrated. There is no rip-and-replace, and you can roll back at any time.

## Questions about PowerMTA

### Can I run PowerMTA and the hosted platform together, and who controls the sending IPs?

Yes. PowerMTA can relay some traffic to the hosted Bird Email API while delivering the rest straight from your own servers, which is the simplest way to try the hosted platform or migrate gradually without moving everything at once. PowerMTA itself runs on infrastructure you own, so those IPs stay yours to manage. Traffic you relay to the hosted platform can use our IPs there, or your own dedicated IPs, while everything else stays entirely under your control.

### What are virtual MTAs?

Virtual MTAs let you run several independent sending streams inside one PowerMTA instance, each with its own IPs, reputation, and limits. Use them to manage transactional mail, marketing mail or different customers separately. Shared domains and recipient-provider policies can still affect delivery across streams.

## Choose how to run your email infrastructure

- [Enterprise email](/email-api/enterprise): Compare managed sending with infrastructure your own team operates.
- [Momentum](/email-api/features/momentum): Customize message processing, delivery policies and routing.
- [Inbox Insights](/email-api/features/inbox-insights): Investigate placement alongside your own delivery reporting.
- [Bird Email platform](/email-api): Explore sending, campaigns, receiving and delivery controls.

## Scale without  losing control.

Organize teams in workspaces, control API access, and trace changes through audit logs.

Harbor Organization
Workspaces Production Sandbox

### Delivery agent

API key · Customer operations team
Active
Permissions Access
Email Read & write
SMS Read & write
WhatsApp Read Read & write
AL Alex Lee Admin  Permissions updated

### Audit log

Production
 API key updated Alex Lee · 09:42:18 UTC

Workspace
Production

Resource
Delivery agent

WhatsApp
Read Read & write

Succeeded

 [Workspaces](/docs/guides/workspaces)[Team roles](/docs/guides/users-teams-roles)[API authentication](/docs/guides/authentication)
[Explore Enterprise](/enterprise)

## Start with Email. Build across channels with Bird.

[Get started](/dashboard/signup?returnTo=%2Fdashboard%2Fw%2Femail) · [Contact Sales](/demo?product=email)

[Email](/email-api) · [SMS](/sms-api) · [WhatsApp](/whatsapp-api) · [Apple Messages](/apple-messages-api) · [Voice](/voice-api)