Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> writes:
In message <4EA8A021.9000805@blakjak.net>, Mark Foster writes:
Why? It's a reasonable position; end users in the generic sense are sending to whatever their client has set up for SMTP, fire-and-forget. Again, I feel like folks are taking their relatively complicated use-cases and treating them as the norm.
It's ths whole attitude that end users are incapable on doing thing correctly. Most user are prefectly fine with having their mail go through a ISP's servers but there are exceptions and when people start say "only a ISP can do this" or "only business need this" by BS detector goes off because individuals do need to do the same sorts of things.
Yes. Moving behind the BS, it's most likely a well calculated difference between designing a product for 99% of the users or going for the full 100%. The problem is that some of the less technical ISP staff, who often are involved in product definitons or financial and marketing decisions, will think that 99% is "everyone" :-) FWIW, we've been running a 25/tcp filter by default for a few years now, offering a knob to turn it off from the start. The knob is one of very few settings the users are offered in their self-service web UI, along with "change my password", "upgrade my account" and similar. Disabling the filter is of course free of charge. And when initially enabling the filter, all users were informed about the possibility to turn it off. Current status is that approx 1% of our users have disabled the filter so far. I assume most of them did so because they actually need access to port 25/tcp, but some may have just turned it off to see what happened and forgot about it. Filters will rarely be enabled again when first disabled, as disabled filters naturally are unnoticable. This makes the number of users disabling any given filter service aggregate over time. Anyway, that's the number we see. YMMV Whether that 1% of users are important to you or not will probably depend on a lot of factors. But I believe it's safe to say that those users can be classified as "power users", who will have a much higher tendency to buy more expensive products and to discuss their their ISP experiences with other power users. This makes them a lot more valuable than the number itself would indicate. Bjørn