On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Michel Py wrote:
<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)? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________