Corporate The Year in Review: MailChannels Features and Product Highlights from 2020 By Ken Simpson | 3 minute read On March 12th, 2020, a day after the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, I nervously drove myself to my chamber choir’s spring concert at a local church. While we sang, someone coughed in the audience and I was hit with a shot of panic. When I returned home later that night, I messaged my team on Slack and directed them to work from home. And that was that. We became a fully remote team. The pandemic brought rapid digitization to the part of the economy that was not yet fully online. Millions of businesses suddenly had to set themselves up for online ordering and delivery. As email grew alongside the explosion in SMB web hosting, MailChannels had a very good year and we are grateful for the businesses that chose to trust us with their email during this time of anxiety and rapid change. Looking back, here are some of the platform improvements that were made during this extraordinary year: Performance Numerous architectural changes were made to improve the performance and scalability of the inbound and outbound filtering platform. Tremendous email volume growth – for instance, volume grew by 110% in May alone – required rapid scaling, pulling forward about a year’s worth of growth into just a few short months. Accuracy Numerous accuracy improvements were rolled out, such as the development of API endpoints to receive false positive and false negative reports from customers. Additional filtering data sources were added, including virus filtering. New methods of detecting compromised accounts were added to our outbound filtering service and we improved our data analysis to track accuracy with greater accuracy. Internationalization Added support for internationalized domain names (IDN), email address internationalization (EAI), and UTF-8 headers to the Inbound Filtering product. Terminology Update Replaced the terms ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ with ‘blocklist’ and ‘safelist’ throughout our platform and all documentation. Domain Aliasing Added support for creating ‘alias’ domains in the inbound filtering product, which can simplify filter management and reduce costs. We added two new products during 2020: Content Analysis API Created an API to allow Email Service Providers (ESPs) to scan message content before sending campaigns out to the internet. Learn more. Inbound Filtering for Large Hosts Improved Inbound Filtering to support hosting companies with up to one million domains. Dramatically improved performance of management APIs for customers with large numbers of domains. Added more UI and APIs to allow bulk management of APIs. Improved cPanel/WHM plugin to make it more suitable in large installations. We want to express our gratitude to everyone using MailChannels to secure and deliver their email. We look forward to serving you in 2021 and beyond!