Patent ID: 7395314

Claim:
A method for governing the delivery rate of electronic mail (email) messages, said method comprising: identifying one or more email messages to be delivered to a plurality of recipients; maintaining a plurality of mail transfer agents (MTAs) that are capable of delivering the email messages simultaneously; initiating delivery of the email messages to the plurality of recipients by allocating the email messages among the plurality of MTAs; monitoring delivery efficiency of said email messages based on the performance of the plurality of MTAs during delivery of the email messages; determining a target delivery rate for said email messages; and controlling the rate of the email delivery based on the delivery efficiency and the target delivery rate of said MTAs by increasing a number of MTAs that are allocated for delivering the email messages when the delivery efficiency of the email messages is below the target delivery rate and decreasing the number of MTAs that are allocated for delivering the email messages when the delivery efficiency is above the target delivery rate.