Begin forwarded message: From: Tom Goltz <tgoltz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: June 23, 2004 10:44:37 AM EDT To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx Cc: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@xxxxxxxxxx>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 ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/