On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 12:00:16PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: >It's rather ridiculous. It makes me think some serious shaking out needs >to happen in the ISP industry, and I'm really wondering if the future of >Internet connectivity isn't paying one company to just provide you with a >pipe and paying a different company that actually knows something about >mail to provide you with mail services.
I suspect that this is exactly why so many people are now using hotmail and allied trades. I've certainly seen the general quality of mail-servers (in terms of how long mail I send them has to wait on the queue and how often it bounces) go down sharply even in the last couple of years; and while hotmail's a major offender, most of the other problem domains are ISPs' own mail services. I do a better job keeping mail and news flowing for the 40 or so users on my private server than any ISP I've encountered (and I've worked for a few). What I'd like to see is more small servers of that sort, run by people who actually care about providing a good-quality service, rather than huge servers run by people who don't care as long as the fees keep coming in... But this is getting off-topic. In list-manager terms, I haven't had a problem with spam-blocks; I check my server IPs regularly against all the blacklists I know about, and I haven't yet got into any of them. So when I've had problems with mail delivery, it's been the user who complains to me about how long mail is taking to arrive. One lesson in reading Received: headers later, the user ends up with a new email address... Roger
