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: Tom Goltz <tgoltz () QuietSoftware com>
Date: June 23, 2004 10:44:37 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Dave's IP no more? Big ISP's want 500 e-mail/day 
limit.

At 09:39 PM 6/22/2004, Lauren Weinstein wrote:
> This proposal, from AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, MS, etc., won't stop
> spammers of course, but would utterly obliterate all but the
> smallest legit mailing lists -- unless, one assumes, you pony up
> extra money for additional e-mail allocations.  Spam could turn out
> to be the holy grail of excuses for ISPs looking for a way to
> move into the lucrative world of usage-sensitive pricing.

As someone who in a previous life was the technical lead for the 
operations department of a small ISP, I have quite a different 
perspective on this.

I don't remember ever being in a meeting where the only goal was to 
maximize profits at the expense of the customer.  The most common 
question was: "How can we reduce costs so that we can afford to match 
the latest price cuts by our competition while still eeking out some 
kind of a profit?"  On the cost side, email was particularly 
nightmarish, since the email volume and associated costs were climbing 
at a rate roughly ten times that of customer revenue growth.  Including 
bandwidth costs, maintenance costs, and capital costs for mail server 
hardware and software, we lost money on an account that sent or 
received as LITTLE as 500 emails per day.

The other nightmare was the omnipresent threat of having our mail 
servers blacklisted by one or more of the "major" ISP's as a spammer.  
Every time AOL, Earthlink or MSN/Hotmail did this, our customer service 
lines were buried under an avalanche of irate customers.  Installing 
limits that affected a small number of customers, but helped insure 
that the majority of our customers could get their email delivered in a 
timely basis was an obvious solution.



Tom Goltz
(603) 594-9922

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