On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 11:57:04AM -0700, Gary E. Miller wrote:
Yo Scott!
On Sat, 4 May 2002, Scott A Crosby wrote:
I'd like the costs quantified.. Servers and disks are expensive, but if they handle a ten million messages during their lifetime, the amortized cost PER MESSAGE is cheap.
I guess at a school you get free labor for setup, admin, backup, tech support, etc. FOr the rest of us those are major costs you left out.
Correct, The people that call in and say "Please delete my mailbox as i can't download anything from it because my mail client freaks out". that costs real $$$, since they want an 800# to dial, and those support costs are not directly tangible to spam but it's very complicated to add up. Most providers needed to build a custom mail system to get past 30-50k users as you can't run that on one beefy system. You need to keep duplicates away, reliable delivery and good responses for checking your mail. Then at this size you need to be integrated into your billing system otherwise your required resources to manage your isp grow very quickly. the costs of smtp() and pop3() are all related here. If you go back 10 years ago, you did not need a dedicated abuse/security staff to police your users. These are all intereleated. - jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.