At 05.24 30/11/2004, you wrote:During development of 1.2, we combined aliases and forwards into one. You can now have addresses that forward to multiple addresses, either local or remote.
This is nice but i need to limit aliases and forwards for billing, i'll try to modify the source but i think it would be useful for other people to allow separate limits. What do you think about it?
How do you define an alias vs. a forward? Do you count the number of email addresses the customer can create, or the number of addresses each message forwards to?
I assume your logic is that you allow more aliases (local addresses) since it doesn't use any bandwidth and limit forwards (remote addresses) due to bandwidth usage.
Or maybe it's just that forwarding to a remote address is more valuable and therefore worth more money?
We're moving in a direction with QmailAdmin where you can have forwards that:
1) Delete email received (blackhole). The real interface isn't done, but you can create blackholes by entering "#" for a forwarding address.
2) Bounce email back with an error message (see qmail's bouncesaying program for details). Again, no interface yet but it's in the planning stages.
3) Forward to any number of local and/or remote addresses.
How should we handle limits? It would seem that there should be no limit on blackhole and bounce addresses, since anyone can set their catchall to deleted or bounce-no-mailbox.
Resource usage for 10 forwards to a single address aren't much different than 1 forward to 10 addresses, so do we start counting the number of addresses forwarded-to, instead of forwarded-from? If so, how do you explain that to the customer?
Perhaps the ultimate form of billing is based on bandwidth and disk utilization. In any given month, come up with the total bandwidth used by inbound and outbound email (maybe excluding spam), and an average daily disk usage and bill accordingly.
I don't see a simple solution to the problem. I'm open to a discussion about it, preferably on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list where there are more end-users who can weigh in. If you're not on that list YaP, please subscribe and join in the discussion ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
-- Tom Collins - [EMAIL PROTECTED] QmailAdmin: http://qmailadmin.sf.net/ Vpopmail: http://vpopmail.sf.net/ Info on the Sniffter hand-held Network Tester: http://sniffter.com/
