Resources

Case studies

Anonymised engagements. Numbers are real; details are abstracted enough to protect client identity. Named references are available under mutual NDA.

European iGaming operator

Consolidation from seven ESPs onto dedicated infrastructure

Challenge: A licensed European sportsbook was sending across seven ESPs accumulated over five years of tooling changes. Reputation was fragmented, complaint rate at Microsoft was above 0.4%, and no single team had visibility into the full sending inventory.
Approach: Full audit of the sending inventory across all seven ESPs. Consolidated onto a Northbound-operated PowerMTA estate with per-brand IP pools, separate transactional streams for KYC and payment notifications, and a phased warm-up of six new IPs. DMARC migrated from monitoring to reject on transactional subdomains within 90 days.
Outcome: Microsoft complaint rate fell from 0.42% to 0.06% within eight weeks of cut-over. Gmail domain reputation moved from Medium to High. Sending inventory reduced to a single documented topology under change control.

US direct-response lead generation

Challenge: A US lender-comparison operator saw its Gmail inbox rate collapse over a quarter with no obvious cause. Nine lead suppliers fed a single sending programme; complaints were rising without attribution to source.
Approach: Instrumented per-source complaint tagging. Identified two suppliers responsible for 61% of complaints. Suppressed those two upstream, isolated the remaining seven onto per-source IPs.
Outcome: Gmail inbox rate recovered 14 points within three weeks. Ongoing per-source scoring is now integrated into the client's procurement decisions.

Regulated crypto exchange

Challenge: A regulated crypto exchange processing 30M transactional messages per month had median password-reset delivery times of 47 seconds at Gmail and periodic spikes past 4 minutes. During market events, spikes turned into user-visible failures.
Approach: Migrated the transactional stream to a dedicated Northbound Postfix cluster with sub-30s latency targets, separated from all marketing traffic. Provisioned 5× peak headroom. DMARC to p=reject on the transactional subdomain within 30 days.
Outcome: Median delivery time to Gmail dropped to 9 seconds; p95 dropped to 22 seconds. No latency-driven support tickets in the six months since cut-over.

European performance agency

Challenge: A European performance agency was running fourteen client programmes across a shared ESP with no per-client IP isolation. One client's list issues repeatedly damaged another client's reputation.
Approach: Per-client IP allocations on a Northbound-operated PowerMTA estate. Agency-branded WHOIS and support attribution. Weekly deliverability engineer embedded with the agency's ops team.
Outcome: Zero cross-client reputation incidents since migration. Client retention improved measurably. The agency's client review pack now includes Northbound-generated deliverability reports.