MailChannels has developed a very interesting method of analyzing what e-mail infrastructure products organizations are using. The company’s PingedIn system sends a series of commands to hundreds of thousands of mail servers in the United States to determine the vendor of the mail server in use and other information.

The result of this ongoing analysis is a continually updated and detailed data set that identifies organizations and what e-mail infrastructure products they have deployed. I have reviewed the first data set and it offers a wealth of information.

At present, MailChannels is currently scanning about 400,000 servers at U.S. organizations across a wide variety of industries. In addition to understanding the mail server products in use, PingedIn also checks DNS records to find groups of mail servers that reveal the use of hosted services and other information.

The real value of the PingedIn service is its ability to understand messaging trends and identify the vertical industries that are using specific e-mail products, as well as how patterns in e-mail infrastructures change over time.

While clearly helpful to organizations like Osterman Research that track this type of data, the data would also be valuable to vendors and industry decision-makers who need to understand market penetration for various products and to gather information on how trends in the use of e-mail products are developing.

At present, the data provided by MailChannels is only being distributed to certain analyst organizations (including Osterman Research), but will be provided to a broader audience beginning in the first quarter of 2007.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.