Paul Vixie wrote:
every time i tell somebody that they shouldn't bother
trying to send e-mail from their dsl or cablemodem ip
address due to the unlikelihood of a well staffed and
well trained and empowered abuse desk defending the
reputation of that address space, i also say "buy a
1U and put it someplace with a real abuse desk, and
use your dsl or cablemodem to tunnel to that place."
<me puts the devil's advocate suit on>
$50 is a lot of money; I currently send email from my aDSL address
because a) my ISP's smarthost sucks b) historically their SMTP hosts
have been blacklisted more than mine c) even if they did not suck (which
has improved a lot recently, actually) they still won't accept large
attachments or mailing-list traffic.
I pay $36/mo for my aDSL. $50 _more_ sounds a lot.
</me puts the devil's advocate suit on>
Besides, although this list is definitely the right place to find people
that would operate a personal SMTP relay in a colo just by the virtue
that it's the geeky thing to do, what does it change in the big scheme
of things? All these small business customers (20 persons) that I have
that use a sub-$100 "business" DSL and M$ Small Business Server +
Exchange are not going to go for it, because the cost then will suddenly
become $50 plus the 1U server plus my time plus maintaining it.
Michel.
<me puts the devil's advocate suit on>
$50 is a lot of money; I currently send email from my aDSL address
because a) my ISP's smarthost sucks b) historically their SMTP hosts
have been blacklisted more than mine c) even if they did not suck (which
has improved a lot recently, actually) they still won't accept large
attachments or mailing-list traffic.
I pay $36/mo for my aDSL. $50 _more_ sounds a lot.
</me puts the devil's advocate suit on>
I checked with our hosting dept. and we won't sell 1U traffic policed colo
quite that cheap. Close to it, but not $50/month. And I agree, for most
people spending an extra $50/month just to be able to send email (though I
imagine they'd also do some personal web hosting and maybe other things as
long as the machine was there), not to mention the expense of buying a 1U
server and having to maintain it remotely isn't going to fly. You'd have
to be a pretty hard core netgeek and have the disposible income ($600/year
+ the server...I can think of lots of better ways to spend that) to
consider that a good solution...at which point why not just pay a bit
extra to your ISP (or another ISP) and get a static IP with reverse DNS,
which I would think would get you excluded from most reasonable DNSBLs.
For most people it'd probably make much more sense to find a provider that
offers some form of SMTP relay service. It'd probably be cheaper/month,
and they wouldn't have the trouble and expense of providing/maintaining
a colo server.
Besides, although this list is definitely the right place to find people
that would operate a personal SMTP relay in a colo just by the virtue
that it's the geeky thing to do, what does it change in the big scheme
I'd imagine you could even find a few friends and share the cost/utility
of the server such that it only cost each person a few dollars/month...but
then someone's got to pay the bills, collect money, harass the people who
don't pay their share, etc.
of things? All these small business customers (20 persons) that I have
that use a sub-$100 "business" DSL and M$ Small Business Server +
Exchange are not going to go for it, because the cost then will suddenly
become $50 plus the 1U server plus my time plus maintaining it.
What if the cost were only $10/month and they didn't have to maintain
anything other than a set of usernames/passwds (SMTP Auth) or perhaps a
list of their own IPs (relaying based on IP)?
I'd have to chime in and say I'm already paying almost $100 for
my aDSL connection for my home. I'm paying for a static IP allocation
which has been SWIP'd with ARIN and have forward and reverse DNS
pointing to my domain. However I deal with on a regular basis ISPs which
will reject the mail from my servers as saying they're dynamic dial-up
IP space. Not that any one of them ever respond to inquires to try and
get removed (RoadRunner being the most recent) from the list; nor the
fact that not one piece of spam has been sent through my servers given
that they are SMTP AUTH only, have extensive anti-virus scanning (which
doesn't send out emails to anyone but postmaster), and spam tagging.
I can understand the ISPs that don't allow hosting of servers on
the DSL line and/or blocking SMTP outbound traffic; however if a
customer is paying for static IP space and the ability to host servers
on the DSL line then it's not dynamic. I'm not gonna pay another
$50/month to have my mail server at some colo just so my mail can be
delievered because some ISP doesn't want to accept the mail. I've even
recently published the SPF details in my zones so any SMTP+SPF compliant
machine can even verify that the message is coming from an authorized
machine. Unfortunately not enough domains are doing the same.
Regards,
Jeremy