Patrick J. LoPresti wrote: > as the little guy can always use his ISP's > mail server.
If only it was that easy! c.1998 I set up the filmscanners list using local s/w sending BCC through my domain host/ISP, cix.co.uk. c.1999 they asked me to make other arrangements as mail volume was contributing to congestion on their permanently iffy server. What they really meant was 'you're using more than you're paying for'. After a lot of looking around at commercial hosting services, I handed over 600GBP (~1,000USD) for them to host it via Majordomo for a year. I found a few commercial services which were cheaper, but none which answered email! 2000 - renewal time, I just didn't have another 600GBP spare. Opened an additional business a/c with Plusnet. 30 day 'refund if not happy' trial was fine. On day 31 list delivery slowed catastrophically. Two weeks of badgering tech support later, they told me they had a policy (undeclared anywhere) of only allowing 12 mails to be sent per hour and mine were being tarpitted because I was 'obviously sending spam'. Proved that I was not. They refused to lift the tarpitting anyway. Asked around a number of ISP's specifically asking if a list generating up to 40,000 mails a day would be a problem. One, vispa.net, said no problem, then promptly shut my new(expensive, business) a/c within 24hrs. without telling me. Deja vu. 'You're sending spam'. Again, I demonstrated it was purely an opt-in, authenticated hobbbyist list, and they responded that anyway, no way would they allow that sort of volume through their server. Bye bye. Next was Clara.net. Again I asked in advance, and they were absolutely fine with me sending via MX record. But the cost of the account and channel-bonded ISDN was high. A few months later they revised their tariffs and it became much more expensive than ADSL, which was 55GBP/m at the time, so... 2001 - talked to Alcom (now Astra) about running my list over ADSL through their SMTP. They thought it would 'probably' be OK. But rather than risk more upheaval and disaster, I decided I'd just DIY and take them out of the loop. Now this is just a small list, and in the great scheme of things unimportant. It has been *the* global source of specialist info on prosumer filmscanners to thousands of pro photographers. But like an awful lot of the non-shopping-mall net, it has no business model, no sponsors, no revenues, and the resources I can expend on it are extremely limited. If it was commercial, it would be running off a shiny fast co-lo server instead of a knackered Celeron400 on my darkroom floor. And it would probably have its own fancy dedicated archive too, and have no need of a pro-bono service like mail-archive. Why not use Yahoo! groups? It's bl**dy Microsoft world domination, administratively awkward, the intrusive ads I find as annoying as spam, and they keep revising the T&C's and changing the service. Regards Tony Sleep - http://www.halftone.co.uk _______________________________________________ Gossip mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
