more on Dave's IP no more? Big ISP's want 500 e-mail/day limit.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Whitney McNamara <whitney () alienabductions com>
Date: June 22, 2004 7:04:36 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Dave's IP no more? Big ISP's want 500 e-mail/day 
limit.


Hi there -

I think it's important to keep from overreacting here.  I don't think
that the recommended limits are a great idea, but they would have no
immediate effect on most mailing lists -- including Dave's IP.

The recommendation is that *consumer* ISPs -- yahoo, aol, msn, etc. --
limit the number of outgoing messages that a single user can send to 150
recipients per hour and 500 recipients per day.

Why doesn't this affect most mailing lists?  Because if you're sending
to a mailing list of 500 names or more, you're probably not sending them
through your ISP as "BCC" copies.  Dave, for example, uses listbox: he
sends one email to listbox, listbox sends the emails to the subscriber
list.

Why should people be using this sort of non-consumer service when
sending to mailing lists?  Because properly removing all the email
addresses that bounce from your mailings, unsubscribing the people who
want to be unsubscribed, subscribing the people who want to be
subscribed -- these are things that you shouldn't be doing manually if
you want to handle requests within a reasonable amount of time.

Furthermore I think that there's a reasonable question to be asked
here:  what are the limits set by the business that's providing you with
email?  Every message has a cost for the ISP -- not signficant for any
one message, but the cumulative cost adds up surprisingly quickly.
Should there be "consumer" and "business" email accounts, with cost
based upon volume of email sent and received?  If not, why not.

- Whit

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