How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the On Premise MTA

One fun thing about being a founder is that you get to be a chef, chief cook, and bottle washer, and on top of that, you have to handle the social media and SEO. In my latest work on helping people discover KumoMTA, I noticed that there are a lot of people searching for an “on-premise MTA”. Seeing it brought back memories of when my good friend and marketing mentor Barbara Burlington did an entire session in one of our meetings on the differences between “On-Premises MTA”, “On-Premise MTA”, and “On-Prem MTA”: On-Premises means on your own property and is often used when talking about MTAs to mean that you’re running your own server, whether it’s in a colocation facility, an in-office rack, or even in your own VM in a public cloud. The main thing “On-Premises MTA” is trying to convey is that you operate the server yourself, as opposed to when you use a cloud solution such as SendGrid or SparkPost.

On the other hand, the term premise refers to an idea, theme, or concept that forms the basis of something. The premise of this blog post is that people are using the wrong term for systems that are not in the cloud, and if I write consistently about that, this blog post could be considered to be “on-premise”. There’s a number of articles out there trying to educate people to stop saying “on-premise” but it’s all for naught as my Google Search Console tells me there’s searches every day for “on premise mta”. If you can’t beat em, join em, and so you end up with a landing page just to help people find the right on premise mta.

After all, is it better to be right, or to get clicks?