Message Bus has a pedigreed CEO, an impressive list of customers and partners and technology that makes its cloud-based service highly scalable and resilient, yet the young company's goal is simple: help customers keep their legitimate email messages out of recipients' spam folders.

With Twitter co-founder Jeremy LaTrasse at the helm, Message Bus is navigating the often dark waters of email delivery so that its customers don't have to. The company's Global Delivery Network, launched in mid-November, aims to be to email and mobile messaging what Amazon Web Services are to cloud computing and Dropbox to cloud storage.

The service is a cloud-native application, meaning that it's not tied to the underlying infrastructure of a single cloud service provider. Therefore Message Bus can scale and move its customers' workloads across different cloud infrastructures as needed (the company says it currently deploys on Joyent, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace cloud services). This approach avoids the scale limitations of working with a single cloud service provider, as well as the possibility of service disruption if a provider experiences an outage.

But it takes more than the right architecture to provide an effective message delivery service. Message Bus has done extensive relationship building with top ISPs including AOL, Microsoft and Google to understand what they expect from a trusted sender and sticks to those guidelines, resulting in a higher likelihood that legitimate emails make it to the inbox.

"More than 90 percent of all mail worldwide ends up in one of those places; if there’s no trust with those ISPs then the message won’t make it into the box," says LaTrasse. "So we had the idea to build best practices into the network, so everyone who sends through our service follows them. We made the relationships happen, and all our customers benefit, as well as their recipients."

Out of control
Currently, one in five legitimate emails is either blocked or routed to the spam folder, says Message Bus, making it difficult for companies relying on email as a primary driver of revenue and brand recognition to get their message across. What's more, the cost and complexity of launching messaging campaigns across multiple channels (email, mobile and social messaging, etc) is spinning out of control.

Customers of the Global Delivery Network don't need dedicated messaging hardware or personnel; instead they build a virtual SMTP bridge to send their messages across Message Bus' network. This significantly reduces upfront infrastructure costs as well as ongoing staffing, says LaTrasse, and allows customers to focus on the content of the messages, knowing that they'll be delivered in a manner that's effective, secure, and complaint.

At the same time it unveiled the Global Delivery Network, Message Bus launched a free reporting service called Discover that informs customers of email senders who may be abusing their domain name for illicit or unauthorized purposes. And late in November the company announced an enhancement to its service with the deployment of Opscode's Hosted Chef to automate configuration, environment and application management across the multiple cloud infrastructures powering the company's service.

Message Bus lists American Greetings, MyFitnessPal, and Telly among its early users.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn at http://linkd.in/T6trhH.)